LES TOUCHES
A few hundred yards from Guerande the soil of Brittany comes to an
end; the salt-marshes and the sandy dunes begin. We descend into a
desert of sand, which the sea has left for a margin between herself
and earth, by a rugged road through a ravine that has never seen a
carriage. This desert contains waste tracts, ponds of unequal size,
round the shores of which the salt is made on muddy banks, and a
little arm of the sea which separates the mainland from the island of
Croisic. Geographically, Croisic is really a peninsula; but as it
holds to Brittany only by the beaches which connect it with the
village of Batz (barren quicksands very difficult to cross), it may be
more correct to call it an island.
At the point where the road from Croisic to Guerande turns off from
the main road of /terra firma/, stands a country-house, surrounded by
a large garden, remarkable for its trimmed and twisted pine-trees,
some being trained to the shape of sun-shades, others, stripped of
their branches, showing their reddened trunks in spots where the bark
has peeled. These trees, victims of hurricanes, growing against wind
and tide (for them the saying is literally true), prepare the mind for
the strange and depressing sight of the marshes and dunes, which
resemble a stiffened ocean. The house, fairly well built of a species
of slaty stone with granite courses, has no architecture; it presents
to the eye a plain wall with windows at regular intervals. These
windows have small leaded panes on the ground-floor and large panes on
the upper floor. Above are the attics, which stretch the whole length
of an enormously high pointed roof, with two gables and two large
dormer windows on each side of it. Under the triangular point of each
gable a circular window opens its cyclopic eye, westerly to the sea,
easterly on Guerande. One facade of the house looks on the road to
Guerande, the other on the desert at the end of which is Croisic;
beyond that little town is the open sea. A brook escapes through an
opening in the park wall which skirts the road to Croisic, crosses the
road, and is lost in the sands beyond it.
The grayish tones of the house harmonize admirably with the scene it
overlooks. The park is an oasis in the surrounding desert, at the
entrance of which the traveller comes upon a mud-hut, where the
custom-house officials lie in wait for him. This house without land
(for the bulk of the estate is really in Guerande) derives an income
from the marshes and a few outlying farms of over ten thousand francs
a year. Such is the fief of Les Touches, from which the Revolution
lopped its feudal rights. The /paludiers/, however, continue to call
it "the chateau," and they would still say "seigneur" if the fief were
not now in the female line. When Felicite set about restoring Les
Touches, she was careful, artist that she is, not to change the
desolate exterior which gives the look of a prison to the isolated
structure. The sole change was at the gate, which she enlivened by two
brick columns supporting an arch, beneath which carriages pass into
the court-yard where she planted trees.
The arrangement of the ground-floor is that of nearly all country
houses built a hundred years ago. It was, evidently, erected on the
ruins of some old castle formerly perched there. A large panelled
entrance-hall has been turned by Felicite into a billiard-room; from
it opens an immense salon with six windows, and the dining-room. The
kitchen communicates with the dining-room through an office. Camille
has displayed a noble simplicity in the arrangement of this floor,
carefully avoiding all splendid decoration. The salon, painted gray,
is furnished in old mahogany with green silk coverings. The furniture
of the dining-room comprises four great buffets, also of mahogany,
chairs covered with horsehair, and superb engravings by Audran in
mahogany frames. The old staircase, of wood with heavy balusters, is
covered all over with a green carpet.
On the floor above are two suites of rooms separated by the staircase.
Mademoiselle des Touches has taken for herself the one that looks
toward the sea and the marshes, and arranged it with a small salon, a
large chamber, and two cabinets, one for a dressing-room, the other
for a study and writing-room. The other suite, she has made into two
separate apartments for guests, each with a bedroom, an antechamber,
and a cabinet. The servants have rooms in the attic. The rooms for
guests are furnished with what is strictly necessary, and no more. A
certain fantastic luxury has been reserved for her own apartment. In
that sombre and melancholy habitation, looking out upon the sombre and
melancholy landscape, she wanted the most fantastic creations of art
that she could find. The little salon is hung with Gobelin tapestry,
framed in marvellously carved oak. The windows are draped with the
heavy silken hangings of a past age, a brocade shot with crimson and
gold against green and yellow, gathered into mighty pleats and trimmed
with fringes and cords and tassels worthy of a church. This salon
contains a chest or cabinet worth in these days seven or eight
thousand francs, a carved ebony table, a secretary with many drawers,
inlaid with arabesques of ivory and bought in Venice, with other noble
Gothic furniture. Here too are pictures and articles of choice
workmanship bought in 1818, at a time when no one suspected the
ultimate value of such treasures. Her bedroom is of the period of
Louis XV. and strictly exact to it. Here we see the carved wooden
bedstead painted white, with the arched head-board surmounted by
Cupids scattering flowers, and the canopy above it adorned with
plumes; the hangings of blue silk; the Pompadour dressing-table with
its laces and mirror; together with bits of furniture of singular
shape,--a "duchesse," a chaise-longue, a stiff little sofa,--with
window-curtains of silk, like that of the furniture, lined with pink
satin, and caught back with silken ropes, and a carpet of Savonnerie;
in short, we find here all those elegant, rich, sumptuous, and dainty
things in the midst of which the women of the eighteenth century lived
and made love.
The study, entirely of the present day, presents, in contrast with the
Louis XV. gallantries, a charming collection of mahogany furniture; it
resembles a boudoir; the bookshelves are full, but the fascinating
trivialities of a woman's existence encumber it; in the midst of which
an inquisitive eye perceives with uneasy surprise pistols, a narghile,
a riding-whip, a hammock, a rifle, a man's blouse, tobacco, pipes, a
knapsack,--a bizarre combination which paints Felicite.
Every great soul, entering that room, would be struck with the
peculiar beauty of the landscape which spreads its broad savanna
beyond the park, the last vegetation on the continent. The melancholy
squares of water, divided by little paths of white salt crust, along
which the salt-makers pass (dressed in white) to rake up and gather
the salt into /mulons/; a space which the saline exhalations prevent
all birds from crossing, stifling thus the efforts of botanic nature;
those sands where the eye is soothed only by one little hardy
persistent plant bearing rosy flowers and the Chartreux pansy; that
lake of salt water, the sandy dunes, the view of Croisic, a miniature
town afloat like Venice on the sea; and, finally the mighty ocean
tossing its foaming fringe upon the granite rocks as if the better to
bring out their weird formations--that sight uplifts the mind although
it saddens it; an effect produced at last by all that is sublime,
creating a regretful yearning for things unknown and yet perceived by
the soul on far-off heights. These wild and savage harmonies are for
great spirits and great sorrows only.
This desert scene, where at times the sun rays, reflected by the
water, by the sands, whitened the village of Batz and rippled on the
roofs of Croisic with pitiless brilliancy, filled Camille's dreaming
mind for days together. She seldom looked to the cool, refreshing
scenes, the groves, the flowery meadows around Guerande. Her soul was
struggling to endure a horrible inward anguish.
No sooner did Calyste see the vanes of the two gables shooting up
beyond the furze of the roadside and the distorted heads of the pines,
than the air seemed lighter; Guerande was a prison to him; his life
was at Les Touches. Who will not understand the attraction it
presented to a youth in his position. A love like that of Cherubin,
had flung him at the feet of a person who was a great and grand thing
to him before he thought of her as a woman, and it had survived the
repeated and inexplicable refusals of Felicite. This sentiment, which
was more the need of loving than love itself, had not escaped the
terrible power of Camille for analysis; hence, possibly, her
rejection,--a generosity unperceived, of course, by Calyste.
At Les Touches were displayed to the ravished eyes of the ignorant
young countryman, the riches of a new world; he heard, as it were,
another language, hitherto unknown to him and sonorous. He listened to
the poetic sounds of the finest music, that surpassing music of the
nineteenth century, in which melody and harmony blend or struggle on
equal terms,--a music in which song and instrumentation have reached a
hitherto unknown perfection. He saw before his eyes the works of
modern painters, those of the French school, to-day the heir of Italy,
Spain, and Flanders, in which talent has become so common that hearts,
weary of talent, are calling aloud for genius. He read there those
works of imagination, those amazing creations of modern literature
which produced their full effect upon his unused heart. In short, the
great Nineteenth Century appeared to him, in all its collective
magnificence, its criticising spirit, its desires for renovation in
all directions, and its vast efforts, nearly all of them on the scale
of the giant who cradled the infancy of the century in his banners and
sang to it hymns with the lullaby of cannon.
Initiated by Felicite into the grandeur of all these things, which
may, perhaps, escape the eyes of those who work them, Calyste
gratified at Les Touches the taste for the glorious, powerful at his
age, and that artless admiration, the first love of adolescence, which
is always irritated by criticism. It is so natural that flame should
rise! He listened to that charming Parisian raillery, that graceful
satire which revealed to him French wit and the qualities of the
French mind, and awakened in him a thousand ideas, which might have
slumbered forever in the soft torpor of his family life. For him,
Mademoiselle des Touches was the mother of his intellect. She was so
kind to him; a woman is always adorable to a man in whom she inspires
love, even when she seems not to share it.
At the present time Felicite was giving him music-lessons. To him the
grand apartments on the lower floor, and her private rooms above, so
coquettish, so artistic, were vivified, were animated by a light, a
spirit, a supernatural atmosphere, strange and undefinable. The modern
world with its poesy was sharply contrasted with the dull and
patriarchal world of Guerande, in the two systems brought face to face
before him. On one side all the thousand developments of Art, on the
other the sameness of uncivilized Brittany. No one will therefore ask
why the poor lad, bored like his mother with the pleasures of
/mouche/, quivered as he approached the house, and rang the bell, and
crossed the court-yard. Such emotions, we may remark, do not assail a
mature man, trained to the ups and downs of life, whom nothing
surprises, being prepared for all.
As the door opened, Calyste, hearing the sound of the piano, supposed
that Camille was in the salon; but when he entered the billiard-hall
he no longer heard it. Camille, he thought, must be playing on a small
upright piano brought by Conti from England and placed by her in her
own little salon. He began to run up the stairs, where the thick
carpet smothered the sound of his steps; but he went more slowly as he
neared the top, perceiving something unusual and extraordinary about
the music. Felicite was playing for herself only; she was communing
with her own being.
Instead of entering the room, the young man sat down upon a Gothic
seat covered with green velvet, which stood on the landing beneath a
window artistically framed in carved woods stained and varnished.
Nothing was ever more mysteriously melancholy than Camille's
improvisation; it seemed like the cry of a soul /de profundis/ to God
--from the depths of a grave! The heart of the young lover recognized
the cry of despairing love, the prayer of a hidden plaint, the groan
of repressed affliction. Camille had varied, modified, and lengthened
the introduction to the cavatina: "Mercy for thee, mercy for me!"
which is nearly the whole of the fourth act of "Robert le Diable." She
now suddenly sang the words in a heart-rending manner, and then as
suddenly interrupted herself. Calyste entered, and saw the reason.
Poor Camille Maupin! poor Felicite! She turned to him a face bathed
with tears, took out her handkerchief and dried them, and said,
simply, without affectation, "Good-morning." She was beautiful as she
sat there in her morning gown. On her head was one of those red
chenille nets, much worn in those days, through which the coils of her
black hair shone, escaping here and there. A short upper garment made
like a Greek peplum gave to view a pair of cambric trousers with
embroidered frills, and the prettiest of Turkish slippers, red and
gold.
"What is the matter?" cried Calyste.
"He has not returned," she replied, going to a window and looking out
upon the sands, the sea and the marshes.
This answer explained all. Camille was awaiting Claude Vignon.
"You are anxious about him?" asked Calyste.
"Yes," she answered, with a sadness the lad was too ignorant to
analyze.
He started to leave the room.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"To find him," he replied.
"Dear child!" she said, taking his hand and drawing him toward her
with one of those moist glances which are to a youthful soul the best
of recompenses. "You are distracted! Where could you find him on that
wide shore?"
"I will find him."
"Your mother would be in mortal terror. Stay. Besides, I choose it,"
she said, making him sit down upon the sofa. "Don't pity me. The tears
you see are the tears a woman likes to shed. We have a faculty that is
not in man,--that of abandoning ourselves to our nervous nature and
driving our feelings to an extreme. By imagining certain situations
and encouraging the imagination we end in tears, and sometimes in
serious states of illness or disorder. The fancies of women are not
the action of the mind; they are of the heart. You have come just in
time; solitude is bad for me. I am not the dupe of his professed
desire to go to Croisic and see the rocks and the dunes and the
salt-marshes without me. He meant to leave us alone together; he is
jealous, or, rather, he pretends jealousy, and you are young, you are
handsome."
"Why not have told me this before? What must I do? must I stay away?"
asked Calyste, with difficulty restraining his tears, one of which
rolled down his cheek and touched Felicite deeply.
"You are an angel!" she cried. Then she gaily sang the "Stay! stay!"
of Matilde in "Guillaume Tell," taking all gravity from that
magnificent answer of the princess to her subject. "He only wants to
make me think he loves me better than he really does," she said. "He
knows how much I desire his happiness," she went on, looking
attentively at Calyste. "Perhaps he feels humiliated to be inferior to
me there. Perhaps he has suspicions about you and means to surprise
us. But even if his only crime is to take his pleasure without me, and
not to associate me with the ideas this new place gives him, is not
that enough? Ah! I am no more loved by that great brain than I was by
the musician, by the poet, by the soldier! Sterne is right; names
signify much; mine is a bitter sarcasm. I shall die without finding in
any man the love which fills my heart, the poesy that I have in my
soul--"
She stopped, her arms pendant, her head lying back on the cushions,
her eyes, stupid with thought, fixed on a pattern of the carpet. The
pain of great minds has something grandiose and imposing about it; it
reveals a vast extent of soul which the thought of the spectator
extends still further. Such souls share the privileges of royalty
whose affections belong to a people and so affect a world.
"Why did you reject my--" said Calyste; but he could not end his
sentence. Camille's beautiful hand laid upon his eloquently
interrupted him.
"Nature changed her laws in granting me a dozen years of youth beyond
my due," she said. "I rejected your love from egotism. Sooner or later
the difference in our ages must have parted us. I am thirteen years
older than /he/, and even that is too much."
"You will be beautiful at sixty," cried Calyste, heroically.
"God grant it," she answered, smiling. "Besides, dear child, I /want/
to love. In spite of his cold heart, his lack of imagination, his
cowardly indifference, and the envy which consumes him, I believe
there is greatness behind those tatters; I hope to galvanize that
heart, to save him from himself, to attach him to me. Alas! alas! I
have a clear-seeing mind, but a blind heart."
She was terrible in her knowledge of herself. She suffered and
analyzed her feelings as Cuvier and Dupuytren explained to friends the
fatal advance of their disease and the progress that death was making
in their bodies. Camille Maupin knew the passion within her as those
men of science knew their own anatomy.
"I have brought him here to judge him, and he is already bored," she
continued. "He pines for Paris, I tell him; the nostalgia of criticism
is on him; he has no author to pluck, no system to undermine, no poet
to drive to despair, and he dares not commit some debauch in this
house which might lift for a moment the burden of his ennui. Alas! my
love is not real enough, perhaps, to soothe his brain; I don't
intoxicate him! Make him drunk at dinner to-night and I shall know if
I am right. I will say I am ill, and stay in my own room."
Calyste turned scarlet from his neck to his forehead; even his ears
were on fire.
"Oh! forgive me," she cried. "How can I heedlessly deprave your
girlish innocence! Forgive me, Calyste--" She paused. "There are some
superb, consistent natures who say at a certain age: 'If I had my life
to live over again, I would so the same things.' I who do not think
myself weak, I say, 'I would be a woman like your mother, Calyste.' To
have a Calyste, oh! what happiness! I could be a humble and submissive
woman--And yet, I have done no harm except to myself. But alas! dear
child, a woman cannot stand alone in society except it be in what is
called a primitive state. Affections which are not in harmony with
social or with natural laws, affections that are not obligatory, in
short, escape us. Suffering for suffering, as well be useful where we
can. What care I for those children of my cousin Faucombe? I have not
seen them these twenty years, and they are married to merchants. You
are my son, who have never cost me the miseries of motherhood; I shall
leave you my fortune and make you happy--at least, so far as money can
do so, dear treasure of beauty and grace that nothing should ever
change or blast."
"You would not take my love," said Calyste, "and I shall return your
fortune to your heirs."
"Child!" answered Camille, in a guttural voice, letting the tears roll
down her cheeks. "Will nothing save me from myself?" she added,
presently.
"You said you had a history to tell me, and a letter to--" said the
generous youth, wishing to divert her thoughts from her grief; but she
did not let him finish.
"You are right to remind me of that. I will be an honest woman before
all else. I will sacrifice no one--Yes, it was too late, yesterday,
but to-day we have time," she said, in a cheerful tone. "I will keep
my promise; and while I tell you that history I will sit by the window
and watch the road to the marshes."
Calyste arranged a great Gothic chair for her near the window, and
opened one of the sashes. Camille Maupin, who shared the oriental
taste of her illustrious sister-author, took a magnificent Persian
narghile, given to her by an ambassador. She filled the nipple with
patchouli, cleaned the /bochettino/, perfumed the goose-quill, which
she attached to the mouthpiece and used only once, set fire to the
yellow leaves, placing the vase with its long neck enamelled in blue
and gold at some distance from her, and rang the bell for tea.
"Will you have cigarettes?--Ah! I am always forgetting that you do not
smoke. Purity such as yours is so rare! The hand of Eve herself, fresh
from the hand of her Maker, is alone innocent enough to stroke your
cheek."
Calyste colored; sitting down on a stool at Camille's feet, he did not
see the deep emotion that seemed for a moment to overcome her.