Volume Iii Part 67 (1/2)
The reading has stopped and their talk turns upon private matters, something about Caroline, and hopes and fears for the future. We will leave them to their conversation, and pa.s.s out through yonder door, pausing for an instant to admire that picture of the Madonna and child, presented to the family by the Queen, and to look through the gla.s.s doors and arched window at the terrace, all green and blossoming with roses and acacias.
Here we are in an M. de Guerin's room, with its table and chairs loaded with books and with dust! That prie-Dieu was embroidered by Mme. de Guerin and whose pensive look face looks out from the pictures, hanging between the fireplace and the bed. There is the cross presented by Christine Rognier, and the holy water vase, and the picture of Calvary before which Eugenie used to kneel and pour out her childish woes. One day she prayed that some spots might disappear from her frock, and a disappeared--and again she begged that her doll might have a soul, but that never came to pa.s.s. No doubt it was in this great state bed that Madame de Guerin died at midnight on the second of April, 1819. Eugenie had fallen asleep at her mother's feet, and as the spirit pa.s.sed away from the long suffering body, M. de Guerin waked the little girl. ”My G.o.d! I hear the priest, I see the lighted candles and a pale face the in tears,” she wrote sixteen years afterwards. Poor little soul! She awoke to the double responsibility of child and parent, for the little eight-year-old Maurice was her mother's legacy to her.
Now a dark spiral staircase in the turret leads to a large hall on the first story, and then winds on with several landing-places to the upper part of the house where the servants sleep.
This hall is the grand reception-room for guests of distinction, and has more and air of grandeur then the rest of the chateau. This ornamented ceiling and deep wainscoting of carved wood, these paintings set in the panels, and that huge chimney-piece supported on stone caryatides, call up to our fancy the days when stately dames and gentle couriers visited Le Cayla for the hunting season. But there is a golden renown in store for this shattered, time-worn house, more precious than that shed upon it by any Guerin of the seventeenth century.
Suites of small rooms lead from the hall--here is the room that Eugenie shares with her younger sister Marie, and near by is the _chambrette_ where Maurice sleeps when he is at home. In his absence it is her nest where she reads, writes, prays, or leans on the window-sill to listen to the brook rippling below the terrace, two doves, and nightingales and all the lovely {413} out-door sounds; or to look over the corn-fields, groves, chestnut trees, and vineyards in the valley, far away to the mountains where the friend, Louis de Bayne, lives in a white chateau with a linden tree walk, in a country of ravines and waterfalls;--but we have indulged long enough in this summer dream of Le Cayla, and must turn to a picture full of sober tints and shadows.
LA CHENAIE
In Brittany, within a few hours drive from Rennes, was the old family place of the Lamennais, where about the year 1830 Hughes Filicite de Lamennais drew about him several of the most promising intellects of France, [Footnote 64] with the view of establis.h.i.+ng a new religious order, that should meet all the demands of that most grasping of centuries, the nineteenth. Montalembert, Gerbert, Sainte-Beuve, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, Combalot, and many others of more or less distinction, were inmates or frequent visitors in the old white house with its peaked French roof, surrounded on every side by thick woods that were full of beauty and song in summer, but in winter pressed about it in dusky--brown monotony, while overhead on the grey, heavy Breton sky.
[Footnote 64: The precise period at which La Chenaie became the resort of the celebrated men we have been unable to ascertain.
The Lamennais were a commercial family in Bordeaux, enn.o.bled during the reign of Louis XVI. L'Abbe de Lamennais, the second son, refusing to become a merchant, retired to La Chenaie, and prepared himself for the priesthood.]
Here Lamennais pa.s.sed through many of the struggles of his giant nature, slow in its action, but never pausing until it had reached the extreme result of any course of thought or feeling. Here, at fifteen years of age, he took refuge with his brother, Jean de Lamennais, to think out the perplexities that clouded his faith so persistently as to prevent him from receiving his first communion until he was twenty-two years old; and hither he came to labor over the task he had proposed to himself, of procuring the banishment of tyranny and suffering from the earth.
At the time Maurice de Guerin [Footnote 65] joined the little circle at La Chenaie, Lamennais had reached the turning point in his career.
After preaching in his journal, with the a.s.surance of a prophet, the public union of Catholicity and democracy, he had suffered the mortification of finding himself obliged to suspend the publication of _L'Avenir_. A visit to Rome, where he was treated with the greatest personal consideration, convinced him that there was no prospect of support from the Holy See, and he returned home oppressed with disappointment, and though apparently submissive to the decisions of his superiors, already resolving in his mind, perhaps unconsciously, plans to crush the power that had crushed him. Those around him feared that he would die of grief. One day he said to his favorite pupil, Elie de Kertauguy, when they were sitting together under one of the Scotch pines behind the chapel, in the great spreading garden: ”There is the place where I wish to rest,” marking out on the gra.s.s the form of a grave with his stick: ”But no tombstone over me--only a mound of earth. Oh! I shall be well off there.”
[Footnote 65: Vide M. Sainte-Beuve's ”Notice sur Maurice de Guerin.”]
”If,” says M. Sainte-Beuve, ”he had died then, or in the following months, if his heart had snapped in it's hidden struggle, what a fair, unblemished memory he would have left, what fame as a faithful believer (fidele) a hero--almost a martyr! What a mysterious subject of meditation and revery to those who love to contemplate great destinies thwarted!” And yet even then Lamennais' sufferings must have proceeded more from wounded pride than from disappointed philanthropy, for one can hardly imagine a sterner course of tyranny then that of forcing dogmatically upon Catholic nations a theory of political freedom that would have thrown half the civilized world into a state of revolution.
{414}
A striking point in M. Sainte-Beuve's masterly a.n.a.lysis of the character of his former friend is the strange contrast offered by the double nature of Lamennais, who always leaned completely to one side or the other, without any gradation, sometimes being possessed by what Buffon calls, in speaking of beasts of prey, ”a soul wrath;” and again filled with a sweetness and tenderness that drew little children to him, a truly fascinating mood; and from one humor to the other he would pa.s.s in an instant.
To La Chenaie and to the influence of this wonderful being, this compound a pathetic gentleness and combative obstinacy, of magnetism and repulsion, Guerin came one afternoon early in the December of 1832. M. Feli, as Lamennais was called in his household, where ceremony was laid aside, and the most charming relations existed between old and young, received him very cordially in his little private parlor, which was furnished with one chair and a chest of drawers. The master had a way of letting the person he was conversing with say everything that he had to say upon a subject without interruption (and uncomfortable method, by the way, of convincing one of the paucity of one's ideas), and then he would take up the matter himself, and speak ”gravely, profoundly, luminously.” But on this occasion he gave himself up freely to a chat upon all sorts of subjects calculated to draw out the general intelligence of his new pupil--the weather in Languedoc, Maurice's traveling companions, his age, the high tides that Saint Malo, Calderon, oyster fis.h.i.+ng, Catholic poetry, Victor Hugo, the most remarkable fishes on the coast of Brittany--all the while hurrying to and fro in the little room, presenting a singular appearance with his small, slender figure clad in grey from head to foot, his oblong head, pale complexion, grey eyes, long nose, and brow furrowed with wrinkles.
The life at La Chenaie suited Guerin's taste admirably, excepting perhaps the practice of rising at five o'clock, against which every well-regulated mind must rebel. One of his great enjoyments was the daily ma.s.s in the quiet little chapel below the terrace in the garden.
”At breakfast,” he wrote to Eugenie, ”we have b.u.t.ter, and bread which we toast to make it more appetizing (toast was rather a luxury in those days on the continent), b.u.t.ter plays an important part in the meals. Dinner _tres confortable_, with coffee and _liqueurs_ when we have company, is seasoned with a rolling fire of wit, generally coming from M. Feli--whose _mots_ are charming--vivid, piercing, sparkling, and innumerable. His genius escapes in this way when he is not at work, and from sublime he becomes fascinating.”
In studies, Maurice was thrown into modern languages, Catholic philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Each pupil had a room to himself, but they all studied in a common room sitting round a good fire. Their recreations consisted in skating on a pond close by the house, or taking walks in the woods, staff in hand, M. Feli marching on ahead wearing a battered old straw hat such as great men love to shelter their ill.u.s.trious heads with. They had supper at eight o'clock and then adjourned to the pleasant, quaint old parlor, where chess and backgammon greeted the master's longing eyes, smoothing his brow and putting him in genial mood. Then he would throw himself on the immense sofa that stood under his grandmother's portrait, and become absorbed into the threadbare crimson velvet, except the little head ever rolling restlessly from side to side with eyes gleaming like fire-flies.
”And then he would talk, Ye G.o.ds! how he would talk!”--
What treasures of wit, humor, anecdote, a.n.a.lysis, and broad generalization poured from that horn of plenty, {415} his mind stored with the prints of nearly half a century of philosophic research and observation of men and things! His voice varied with his words from grave to gay, and now and then came long peals of shrill laughter, more derisive perhaps than mirthful. ”That is _our man!_” said Maurice proudly, after describing such an evening; that evening perhaps when his own attractions eclipsed the master's brilliancy in the estimation of one who saw him for the first time--M. de Marzan, a former pupil of Lamennais, who revisited La Chenaie on the 18th of December, 1832.
M. Feli was in one of his most delightful moods, recounting the experiences of his late Italian journey, and drawing out in his genial way the keen observations of the young men about him--of all excepting poor Maurice, who stood silent among the hopeful, eager talkers, painfully conscious of himself and distrustful of others, we must confess, with all affectionate sympathy for our hero. But in his reserved mien, in his expressive southern eyes and intellectual face, there was a magnetism that won completely M. de Marzan's attention from the delights of conversation, and as soon as the evening ended, he obtained an introduction through Elie de Kertauguy, a handsome, gifted youth from Lower Brittany, pa.s.sionately devoted to Lamennais, and compa.s.sionately attentive to Guerin, regarding him, as did most of the inmates of La Chenaie, as a refined but very inefficient member of their circle.
Not so Marzan, who in twenty-four hours had thawed Maurice's reserve, won his confidence, seen his journal, heard the circ.u.mstances of his unrequited love for Mlle. de Bayne, and laid the foundation of a friends.h.i.+p that lasted unbroken to the day of Guerin's death. What days, and nights too, of rapture these two young poets used to spend together, guided by their older and more experienced friend, Hippolyte de La Morvonnais (a frequent visitor at La Chenaie), who had been to Grasmere to visit Wordsworth, and come home imbued with veneration for ”Les Lakistes”. (The Lake Poets). There came to be a mania among the three friends for describing in homely language the simplest domestic details, which they considered it a triumph in art to be able to give in a rhythm so dubious that none but the initiated could tell whether it was meant for prose or verse.
Even at this early period, Guerin gave evidence of the peculiar strength and weakness of his style, the vagueness and looseness of his verse, the faultless harmony of his prose, which is as pure as air, free from the least touch of provincialism or mannerism; and yet, in the simple fervor of its revelations of the secrets that nature poured into his attentive ear, we are reminded of the sweet pipings of the Ettrick Shepherd, as dear old Christopher North interprets them to us.
Through him we see and hear trees wave and waters flow, birds sing and winds sigh in the woods, and without being disturbed by moral inferences and philosophical conclusions. And surely, when beauty comes to us so pure and fresh and untarnished, she may be left to teach her own lessons, which come to us so softly too from her lips.
The months that Maurice spent at La Chenaie were not especially fruitful to him, except in the sad experiences that tended to develop his moral strength. But for Morvonnais and Marzan, he would have remained quite unappreciated, for Lamennais, who gave the tone to the household, was too much ”absorbed in his apocalyptic social visions”
[Footnote 66] to be conscious of the jewel that glittered before his eyes. Lamennais was a logician, a philosopher, a pa.s.sionate and fanatical worker. Guerin was a man of {416} exquisite artistic perceptions, but dreamy, undecided, deficient in vigor. Odin and Apollo,--sledge-hammer and chisel,--thunderbolt and sunbeam, are not more unlike in use and significance. M. Feli offered nothing but pitying tenderness, which Maurice accepted in dumb veneration. No wonder that, with the life at La Chenaie, all intimate intercourse between them ceased.