the incense of banquets, looked with a great yearning
over that life of his dreams, rose uplifted and radiant in
glorious triumph, raised a statue to himself, summoned up
all his illusions to bid them farewell in a last Olympian
carouse. The magic could only last for a little while ;
it fled, it had vanished for ever. In that supreme moment
he clung to his beautiful tree as if it had been a friend ;
then he put the stones, one in either pocket, and buttoned
his overcoat. His hat he had purposely left at home.
He went down the bank to look for a deep spot which
he had had in view for some time ; and slid in resolutely,
trying to make as little noise as possible. There was
scarcely a sound.
When Mme. Granson came home about half-past
nine that night, the maid-of-all-work said nothing of
Athanase, but handed her a letter. Mme. Granson
opened it and read —
'I have gone away, my kind mother j do not think
hardly of me.' That was all.
* A pretty thing he has done ! ' cried she. 'And how
about his linen and the money ? But he will write, and
I shall find him. The poor children always think
themselves wiser than their fathers and mothers.' And
she went to bed with a quiet mind.
The Sarthe had risen with yesterday's rain. Fishers
and anglers were prepared for this, for the swollen river
washes down the eels from the little streams on its
course. It so happened that an eel-catcher had set his
lines over the very spot where poor Athanase had
chosen to drown himself, thinking that he should never
be heard of again ; and next morning, about six o'clock,
the man drew out the young dead body.
One or two women among Mme. Granson's few
138 The Jealousies of a Country Town
friends went to prepare the poor widow with all possible
care to receive the dreadful yield of the river. The
news of the suicide, as might be expected, produced a
tremendous sensation. Only last evening the poverty-
stricken man of genius had not a single friend ; the
morning after his death scores of voices cried, 'I would
so willingly have helped him ! ' So easy is it to play a
charitable part when no outlay is involved. The
Chevalier de Valois, in the spirit of revenge, explained
the suicide. It was a boyish, sincere, and noble passion
for Mile. Cormon that drove Athanase to take his own
life. And when the Chevalier had opened Mme.
Granson's eyes, she saw a multitude of little things to
confirm this view. The story grew touching ; women
cried over it.
Mme. Granson sorrowed with a dumb concentration
of grief which few understood. For mothers there are
two ways of bereavement. It often ^happens that every
one else can understand the greatness of her loss ; her
boy was admired and appreciated, young or handsome,
with fair prospects before him or brilliant successes won
already ; every one regrets him, every one shares her
mourning, and the grief that is widely spread is not so
hard to bear. Then there is the loss that one under-
stands. No one else knew her boy and all that he was ;
his smiles were for her alone ; she, and she only, knew
how much perished with that life, too early cut short.
Such sorrow hides itself; beside that darkness other
woe grows pale ; no words can describe it ; and, happily,
there are not many women who know what it is to have
those heart-strings finally severed.
Even before Mme. du Bousquier came back to town,
her obliging friend, Mme. du Ronceret, went to fling a
dead body down among the roses of her new-wedded
happiness, to let her know what a love she had refused.
Ever so gently the Presidente squeezed a shower of
drops of wormwood over the honey of the first month
The Jealousies of a Country Town 139
of married life. And as Mme. du Bousquier returned,
it so happened that she met Mme. Granson at the corner
of the Val-Noble, and the look in the heartbroken
mother's eyes cut her to the quick. It was a look from
a woman dying of grief, a thousand curses gathered up
into one glance of malediction, a thousand sparks in one
gleam of hate. It frightened Mme. du Bousquier ; it
boded ill and invoked ill upon her.
Mme. Granson had belonged to the party most
opposed to the cure ; she was a bitter partisan of the
priest of St. Leonard's ; but on the very evening of the
tragedy she thought of the rigid orthodoxy of her own
party, and she shuddered. She herself laid her son in his
shroud, thinking all the while of the Mother of the
Saviour ; then with a soul quivering with agony, she
betook herself to the house of the perjured priest. She
found him busy, the humble good man, storing the
hemp and flax which he gave to poor women and girls
to spin, so that no worker should ever want work, a
piece of wise charity which had saved more than one
family that could not endure to beg. He left his hemp
at once and brought his visitor into the dining-room,
where the stricken mother saw the frugality of her own
housekeeping in the supper that stood waiting for the
cure.
1 M. 1'Abbe,' she began, c I have come to entreat
you '
She burst into tears, and could not finish the sentence.
c I know why you have come,' answered the holy
man, * and I trust to you, madame, and to your relative
Mme. du Bousquier to make it right with his Lordship
at Seez. Yes, I will pray for your unhappy boy ; yes,
I will say masses ; but we must avoid all scandal, we
must give no occasion to ill-disposed people to gather
together in the church. ... I myself, alone, and at
night '
*• Yes, yes, as you wish, if only he is laid in consecrated
140 The Jealousies of a Country Town
ground ! ' she said, poor mother ; and taking the priest's
hand in hers, she kissed it,
And so, just before midnight, a bier was smuggled
into the parish church. Four young men, Athanase's
friends, carried it. There were a few little groups of
veiled and black-clad women, Mme. Granson's friends,
and some seven or eight lads that had been intimate
with the dead. The bier was covered with a pall,
torches were lit at the corners, and the cure read the
office for the dead, with the help of one little choir boy
whom he could trust. Then the suicide was buried,
noiselessly, in a corner of the churchyard, and a dark
wooden cross with no name upon it marked the grave
for the mother. Athanase lived and died in the shadow.
Not a voice was raised against the cure ; his Lordship
at Seez was silent ; the mother's piety redeemed her son's
impious deed.
Months afterwards, moved by the inexplicable thirst
of sorrow which drives the unhappy to steep their lips
in their bitter cup, the poor woman went to see the
place where her son drowned himself. Perhaps she felt
instinctively that there were thoughts to be gathered
under the poplar tree ; perhaps, too, she longed to see
all that his eyes had seen for the last time. The sight
of the spot would kill many a mother ; while again there
are some who can kneel and worship there. — There are
truths on which the patient anatomist of human nature
cannot insist too much ; verities against which educa-
tion and laws and systems of philosophy are shattered.
It is absurd — let us repeat it again and again — to try to
lay down hard and fast rules in matters of feeling ; the
personal element comes in to modify feeling as it arises,
and a man's character influences his most instinctive
actions.
Mme. Granson, by the river-side, saw a woman at
some distance — a woman who came nearer, till she
reached the fatal spot, and exclaimed —
The jealousies of a Country Town 141
' Then this is the place ! '
One other woman in the world wept there as the
mother was weeping, and that woman was Suzanne.
She had heard of the tragedy on her arrival that morning
at the Three Moors. If poor Athanase had been alive,
she might have done what poor and generous people
dream of doing, and the rich never think of putting in
practice ; she would have enclosed a thousand francs
with the words, ' Money lent by your father to a com-
rade who now repays you.' During her journey
Suzanne had thought of this angelic way of giving. She
looked up and saw Mme. Granson.
' I loved him,' she said ; then she hurried away.
Suzanne, true to her nature, did not leave Alencon
till she had changed the bride's wreath of orange
flowers to water-lilies. She was the first to assert that
Mme. du Bousquier would be Mile. Cormon as long as
she lived. And with one jibe she avenged both
Athanase and the dear Chevalier de Valois.
Alencon beheld another and more piteous suicide.
Athanase was promptly forgotten by a world that will-
ingly, and indeed of necessity, forgets its dead as soon as
possible ; but the poor Chevalier's existence became a
kind of death-in-life, a suicide continued morning after
morning during fourteen years. Three months after
du Bousquier's marriage, people remarked, not without
astonishment, that the Chevalier's linen was turning
yellow, and his hair irregularly combed. M. de Valois
was no more, for a dishevelled M. de Valois could not
be said to be himself. An ivory tooth here and there
deserted from the ranks, and no student of human
nature could discover to what corps they belonged,
whether they were native or foreign, animal or vege-
table ; nor whether, finally, they had been extracted by
old age, or were merely lying out of sight and out of
mind in the Chevalier's dressing-table drawer. His
cravat was wisped, careless of elegance, into a cord.
142 The Jealousies of a Country Town
The negroes' heads grew pale for lack of soap and
water. The lines on the Chevalier's face deepened into
wrinkles and darkened as his complexion grew more
and more like parchment ; his neglected nails were
sometimes adorned with an edge of black velvet. Grains
of snuff lay scattered like autumn leaves in the furrows
of his waistcoat. The cotton in his ears was but seldom
renewed. Melancholy, brooding on his brow, spread
her sallow hues through his wrinkles ; in short, time's
ravages, hitherto so carefully repaired, began to appear
in rifts and cracks in the noble edifice. Here was
proof of the power of the mind over matter ! The
blond cavalier, the jeune premier, fell into decay when
hope failed.
Hitherto the Chevalier's nose had made a peculiarly
elegant appearance in public ; never had it been seen to
distil a drop of amber, to let fall a dark wafer of moist
rappee ; but now, with a snuff-bedabbled border about
the nostrils, and an unsightly stream taking advantage of
the channel hollowed above the upper lip, that nose,
which no longer took pains to please, revealed the
immense trouble that the Chevalier must have formerly
taken with himself. In this neglect you saw the
extent, the greatness and persistence of the man's
designs upon Mile. Cormon. The Chevalier was
crushed by a pun from du Coudrai, whose dismissal he
however procured. It was the first instance of vindic-
tiveness on the part of the urbane gentleman j but then
the pun was atrocious, worse by a hundred cubits than
any other ever made by the registrar of mortgages. M.
du Coudrai, observing this nasal revolution, had nick-
named the Chevalier ' Nerestan ' (nez-restant).
Latterly the Chevalier's witticisms had been few and
far between ; the anecdotes went the way of the teeth,
but his appetite continued as good as ever ; out of the
great shipwreck of his hopes he saved nothing but his
digestion ; and while he took his snuff feebly, he des-
The Jealousies of a Country Town 143
patched his dinner with an avidity alarming to behold.
You may mark the extent of the havoc wrought in his
ideas in the fact that his colloquies with the Princess
Goritza grew less and less frequent. He came to Mile.
Armande's one day with a false calf in front of his
shins. The bankruptcy of elegance was something
painful, I protest ; all Alencon was shocked by it. It
scared society to see an elderly young man drop sud-
denly into his dotage, and from sheer depression of
spirits pass from fifty to ninety years. And besides, he
had betrayed his secret. He had been waiting and
lying in wait for Mile. Cormon. For ten long years,
persevering sportsman that he was, he had been stalking
the game, and he had missed his shot. The impotent
Republic had won a victory over a valiant Aristocracy,
and that in full flood of Restoration ! The sham had
triumphed over the real ; spirit was vanquished by
matter, diplomacy by insurrection ; and as a final mis-
fortune, a grisette in an outbreak of bad temper, let out
the secret of the Chevalier's levees !
At once he became a man of the worst character.
The Liberal party laid all du Bousquier's foundlings on
the Chevalier's doorstep, while the Faubourg Saint-
Germain of Alencon boastingly accepted them ; laughed
and cried, 'The dear Chevalier ! What else could he
do ? ' Saint-Germain pitied the Chevalier, took him to
its bosom, and smiled more than ever upon him ; while
an appalling amount of unpopularity was drawn down
upon du Bousquier's head. Eleven persons seceded from
the salon Cormon and went over to the d'Esgrignons.
But the especial result of the marriage was a more
sharply-marked division of parties in Alencon. The
Maison d'Esgrignon represented undiluted aristocracy;
for the Troisvilles on their return joined the clique.
The Maison Cormon, skilfully influenced by du Bous-
quier, was not exactly Liberal, nor yet resolutely
Royalist, but of that unlucky shade of opinion which
144 The Jealousies of a Country Town
produced the 221 members, so soon as the political
struggle took a definite shape, and the greatest, most
august, and only real power of Kingship came into
collision with that most false, fickle, and tyrannical
power which, when wielded by an elective body, is
known as the power of Parliament.
The third salon, the salon du Ronceret, out and out
Radical in its politics, was secretly allied with the
Maison Cormon.
With the return from the Prebaudet, a life of con-
tinual suffering began for the Abbe de Sponde. He
kept all that he endured locked within his soul, uttering
not a word of complaint to his niece ; but to Mile.
Armande he opened his heart, admitting that taking one
folly with another, he should have preferred the Cheva-
lier. M. de Valois would not have had the bad taste to
thwart a feeble old man with but a few days to live.
Du Bousquier had pulled the old home to pieces.
'Mademoiselle,' the old Abbe said as the thin tears
fell from his faded old eyes, 'the lime-tree walk, where
I have been used to meditate these fifty years, is gone.
My dear lime-trees have all been cut down ! Just as I
am nearing the end of my days the Republic has come
back again in the shape of a horrible revolution in the
house.'
' Your niece must be forgiven,' said the Chevalier de
Valois. ' Republicanism is a youthful error ; youth goes
out to seek for liberty, and finds tyranny in its worst
form — the tyranny of the impotent rabble. Your niece,
poor thing, has not been punished by the thing wherein
she sinned.'
'What is to become of me in a house with naked
women dancing all over the walls ? Where shall I find
the lime-tree walks where I used to read my breviary ? '
Like Kant, who lost the thread of his ideas when
somebody cut down the fir-tree on which he fixed his
The Jealousies of a Country Town 145
eyes as he meditated, the good Abbe pacing up and
down the shadowless alleys could not say his prayers
with the same uplifting of soul. Du Bousquier had laid
out an English garden !
'It looked nicer,' Mme. du Bousquier said. Not that
she really thought so, but the Abbe Couturier had
authorised her to say and do a good many things that
she might please her husband.
With the restoration, all the glory departed from the
old house, and all its quaint, cheerful, old-world look. If
the Chevalier de Valois's neglect of his person might be
taken as a sort of abdication, the bourgeois majesty of
the salon Cormon passed away when the drawing-room
was decorated with white and gold ; and blue silk
curtains and mahogany ottomans made their appear-
ance. In the dining-room, fitted up in the modern
style, the dishes were somehow not so hot, nor the
dinners quite what they had been. M. du Coudrai said
that the puns stuck fast in his throat when he saw the
painted figures on the walls and felt their eyes upon him.
Without, the house was provincial as ever ; within, the
forage-contractor of the Directory made himself every-
where felt. All over the house you saw the stock-
broker's bad taste ; stucco pilasters, glass doors, classic
cornices, arid decoration — a medley of every imaginable
style and ill-assorted magnificence.
Alencon criticised such unheard-of luxury for a fort-
night, and grew proud of it at the end of a few months.
Several rich manufacturers refurnished their houses in
consequence, and set up fine drawing-rooms. Modern
furniture made its appearance j astral lamps might even
be seen in some places.
The Abbe de Sponde was the first to see the unhappi-
ness which lay beneath the surface of his dear child's
married life. The old dignified simplicity which ruled
their way of living was gone ; du Bousquier gave two
balls every month in the course of the first winter. The
K
146 The Jealousies of a Country Town
venerable house — oh, to think of it ! — echoed with the
sound of violins and worldly gaiety. The Abbe, on his
knees, prayed while the merriment lasted.
The politics of the sober salon underwent a gradual
change for the worse. The Abbe de Sponde divined
du Bousquier ; he shuddered at his nephew's dicta-
torial tone. He saw tears in his niece's eyes when the
disposal of her fortune was taken out of her hands ;
her husband left her only the control of the linen, the
table, and such things as fall to a woman's lot. Rose
had no more orders to give. Jacquelin, now coachman
exclusively, took his orders from no one but his master ;
Rene, the groom, did likewise, so did the man-cook
imported from Paris; Mariette was only the kitchen-
maid ; and Mme. du Bousquier had no one to tyrannise
over but Josette.
Does any one know how much it costs to give up the
delicious exercise of authority ? If the triumph of will
is one of the most intoxicating of the great man's joys,
to have one's own way is the whole life of narrow
natures. No one but a cabinet minister fallen into dis-
grace can sympathise with Mme. du Bousquier's bitter
pain when she saw herself reduced to a cipher in her
own house. She often drove out when she would
rather have stayed at home ; she saw company which
she did not like ; she who had been free to spend as she
pleased, and had never spent at all, had lost the control
of the money which she loved. Impose limits, and who
does not wish to go beyond them ? Is there any
sharper suffering than that which comes of thwarted
will ?
But these beginnings were the roses of life. Every
concession was counselled by poor Rose's love for her
husband, and at first du Bousquier behaved admirably
to his wife. He was very good to her ; he brought
forward sufficient reasons for every encroachment. The
room, so long left empty, echoed with the voices of
The Jealousies of a Country Town 147
husband and wife in fireside talk. And so, for the first
few years of married life, Mme. du Bousquier wore a
face of content, and that little air of emancipation and
mystery often seen in a young wife after a marriage of
love. She had no more trouble with 'heated blood.'
This countenance of hers routed scoffers, gave the lie to
gossip concerning du Bousquier, and put observers of
human nature at fault.
Rose Marie Victoire was so afraid lest she should lose
her husband's affection or drive him from her side by
setting her will against his, that she would have made
any sacrifice, even of her uncle if need be. And the
Abbe de Sponde, deceived by Mme. du Bousquier's poor
foolish little joys, bore his own discomforts the more
easily for the thought that his niece was happy.
At first Alencon shared this impression. But there
was one man less easy to deceive than all the rest of
Alencon put together. The Chevalier de Valois had
taken refuge on the Mons Sacer of the most aristocratic
section, and spent his time with the d'Esgrignons. He
lent an ear to the scandal and tittle-tattle ; night and
day he studied how to have his revenge before he died.
The perpetrator of puns had been already brought low,
and he meant to stab du Bousquier to the heart.
The poor Abbe, knowing as he did the cowardliness
of his niece's first and last love, shuddered as he guessed
his nephew's hypocritical nature and the man's intrigues.
Du Bousquier, be it said, put some constraint upon him-
self; he had an eye to the Abbe's property, and had no
wish to annoy his wife's uncle in any way, yet he dealt
the old man his deathblow.
If you can translate the word Intolerance by Firmness
of Principle; if you can forbear to condemn in the old
Roman Catholic Vicar-General that stoicism which
Scott has taught us to revere in Jeanie Deans's Puritan
father; if, finally, you can recognise in the Roman
Church the nobility of a Potius mori quam fcedari which
148 The Jealousies of a Country Town
you admire in a Republican — then you can understand
the anguish that rent the great Abbe de Sponde when
he saw the apostate in his nephew's drawing-room ;
when he was compelled to meet the renegade, the back-
slider, the enemy of the Church, the aider and abettor
of the Oath to the Constitution. It was du Bousquier's
private ambition to lord it over the countryside ; and as
a first proof of his power, he determined to reconcile the
officiating priest of St. Leonard's with the cure of
Alencon. He gained his object. His wife imagined
that peace had been made where the stern Abbe saw no
peace, but surrender of principle. M. de Sponde was
left alone in the faith. The Bishop came to du Bous-
quier's house, and appeared satisfied with the cessation of
hostilities. The Abbe Francois's goodness had con-
quered every one — every one except the old Roman of
the Roman Church, who might have cried with
Cornelie, c Ah, God ! what virtues you make me hate ! '
The Abbe de Sponde died when orthodoxy expired in
the diocese.
In 18 19 the Abbe de Sponde's property raised Mme.
du Bousquier's income from land to twenty-five thou-
sand livres without counting the Prebaudet or the house
in the Val-Noble. About the same time du Bousquier
returned the amount of his wife's savings (which she
had made over to him), and instructed her to invest the
moneys in purchases of land near the Prebaudet, so that
the estate, including the Abbe de Sponde's adjoining pro-
perty, was one of the largest in the department. As for
du Bousquier, he invested his money with the Kellers,
and made a journey to Paris four times a year. Nobody
knew the exact amount of his private fortune, but at
this time he was supposed to be one of the wealthiest
men in the department of the Orne. A dexterous man,
and the permanent candidate of the Liberal party, he
always lost his election by seven or eight votes under
the Restoration. Ostensibly he repudiated his connec-
The Jealousies of a Country Town 149
tion with the Liberals, offering himself as a Ministerial-
Royalist candidate; but although he succeeded in gaining
the support of the Congregation and of the magistra-
ture, the repugnance of the administration was too
strong to be overcome.
Then the rabid Republican, frantic with ambition,
conceived the idea of beginning a struggle with the
Royalism and Aristocracy of the country, just as they
were carrying all before them. He gained the support
of the clergy by an appearance of piety very skilfully
kept up ; always going with his wife to mass, giving
money to the convents, and supporting the confraternity
of the Sacre-Cceur ; and whenever a dispute arose
between the clergy and the town, or the department, or
the State, he was very careful to take the clerical side.
And so, while secretly supported by the Liberals, he
gained the influence of the Church ; and as a Constitu-
tional-Royalist kept close beside the aristocratic section,
the better to ruin it. And ruin it he did. He was
always on the watch for any mistake on the part of those
high in rank or in office under the Government ; with
the support of the bourgeoisie he carried out all the im-
provements which the nobles and officials ought to have
undertaken and directed, if the imbecile jealousies of
place had not frustrated their efforts. Constitutional
opinion carried him through in the affair of the cure, in
the theatre question, and in all the various schemes of
improvement which du Bousquier first prompted the