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"How I love those people!" cries Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, of
Madame de Sevigne and some other of her literary favourites in the
days of the Grand Monarch. "What good company! What pleasure they
took in high things! How much more worthy they were than the people
who live now!"--What good company! That is precisely what the
admirer of M. Feuillet's books feels as one by one he places them on
his book-shelf, to be sought again. What is proposed here is not to
tell his last story, [221] but to give the English reader specimens
of his most recent effort at characterisation.
It is with the journal of Bernard himself that the story opens,
September 187-. Bernard-Maurice Hugon de Montauret, Vicomte de
Vaudricourt, is on a visit to his uncle, the head of his family, at
La Saviniere, a country-house somewhere between Normandy and
Brittany. This uncle, an artificial old Parisian in manner, but
honest in purpose, a good talker, and full of real affection for his
heir Bernard, is one of M. Feuillet's good minor characters--one of
the quietly humorous figures with which he relieves his more serious
company. Bernard, with whom the refinements of a man of fashion in
the Parisian world by no means disguise a powerful intelligence
cultivated by wide reading, has had thoughts during his tedious stay
at La Saviniere of writing a history of the reign of Louis the
Fourteenth, the library of a neighbouring chateau being rich in
memoirs of that period. Finally, he prefers to write his own story,
a story so much more interesting to himself; to write it at a
peculiar crisis in his life, the moment when his uncle, unmarried,
but anxious to perpetuate his race, is bent on providing him with a
wife, and indeed has one in view.
The accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his own
confession, takes nothing seriously. As to that matter of religious
beliefs, "the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] over
him, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty space
there." Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing
from him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all
intelligent male Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a
gaiety, serene and imperturbable, has been the mainstay of his
happily constituted character. The girl to whom his uncle desires to
see him united--odd, quixotic, intelligent, with a sort of pathetic
and delicate grace, and herself very religious--belongs to an old-
fashioned, devout family,. resident at Varaville, near by. M.
Feuillet, with half a dozen fine touches of his admirable pencil
makes us see the place. And the enterprise has at least sufficient
interest to keep Bernard in the country, which the young Parisian
detests. "This piquant episode of my life," he writes, "seems to me
to be really deserving of study; to be worth etching off, day by day,
by an observer well informed on the subject."
Recognising in himself, though as his one real fault, that he can
take nothing seriously in heaven or earth, Bernard de Vaudricourt,
like all M. Feuillet's favourite young men, so often erring or
corrupt, is a man of scrupulous "honour." He has already shown
disinterestedness in wishing his rich uncle to marry again. His
friends at Varaville think so well-mannered a young man more of a
Christian than he really is; and, at all events, he will never owe
his happiness to a falsehood. If he has great faults, [223]
hypocrisy at least is no part of them. In oblique paths he finds
himself ill at ease. Decidedly, as he thinks, he was born for
straight ways, for loyalty in all his enterprises; and he
congratulates himself upon the fact.
In truth, Bernard has merits which he ignores, at least in this first
part of his journal: merits which are necessary to explain the
influence he is able to exercise from the first over such a character
as Mademoiselle de Courteheuse. His charm, in fact, is in the union
of that gay and apparently wanton nature with a genuine power of
appreciating devotion in others, which becomes devotion in himself.
With all the much-cherished elegance and worldly glitter of his
personality, he is capable of apprehending, of understanding and
being touched by the presence of great matters. In spite of that
happy lightness of heart, so jealously fenced about, he is to be
wholly caught at last, as he is worthy to be, by the serious, the
generous influence of things. In proportion to his immense worldly
strength is his capacity for the immense pity which breaks his heart.
In a few life-like touches M. Feuillet brings out, as if it were
indeed a thing of ordinary existence, the simple yet delicate life of
a French country-house, the ideal life in an ideal France. Bernard
is paying a morning visit at the old turreted home of the
"prehistoric" Courteheuse family. Mademoiselle Aliette de
Courteheuse, a studious girl, though a bold and excellent rider [224]
--Mademoiselle de Courteheuse, "with her hair of that strange colour
of fine ashes"--has conducted her visitor to see the library:
One day she took me to see the library, rich in works of the
seventeenth century and in memoirs relating to that time. I
remarked there also a curious collection of engravings of the
same period. "Your father," I observed, "had a strong
predilection for the age of Louis the Fourteenth."
"My father lived in that age," she answered gravely. And as
I looked at her with surprise, and a little embarrassed, she
added, "He made me live there too, in his company."
And then the eyes of this singular girl filled with tears.
She turned away, took a few steps to suppress her emotion, and
returning, pointed me to a chair. Then seating herself on the
step of the book-case, she said, "I must explain my father
to you."
She was half a minute collecting her thoughts: then, speaking
with an expansion of manner not habitual with her, hesitating,
and blushing deeply, whenever she was about to utter a word that
might seem a shade too serious for lips so youthful:--"My
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