Volume 3 — TWO PICTURES OF LIFE IN FRANCE BEFORE 1848.

Those who are familiar with the Journal of Eugénie de Guérin, know that in Languedoc, near the towns or villages of Andillac and Gaillac, and not far from Toulouse, there is an ancient estate called Le Cayla; but they know little more than this of the place where Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin passed their youth in the quaint an beautiful simplicity that stamped their genius with so marked and individuality.

The peasantry of that region are wedded to old habits and traditions, and the ancient families are imbedded like rocks in the land, says Lamartine, (from whose "Entretiens" many of these local details are taken), and are nobles by common consent, because the château is merely the largest ruin in the village, and every one goes there as to a home to get whatever he needs in the way of advice, agricultural tools, medicine or food.

Let us in the imagination visit the Château of like a lot, as it was in the year 1837, four we must make our first acquaintance with it when it is graced by the exquisite presence of those two, whose names are fast becoming household words on both sides of the Atlantic --Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin.

It is not like one's dream of an ancient castel, this spreading, rectangular house, built of brick and stone after a fashion of Henry the Fourth's time, and perched on the summit of a sharp declivity. There is little to distinguish it from the great farms of the country round, but a half ruined portico, projecting over the flight of stone steps, a pointed current and the grooves of a drawbridge, over which the ruthless hand of 1793 as effaced the ancient arms of the Guérins. The great flagstones of the courtyard were loosened and uprooted long ago by the drainage from the stables, and in the angles of the wall grow holly and elder bushes, not too aristocratic to take root in such a soil. These gates stand open always, admitting wayfarers who may wish for a cup of water from the bucket hanging behind the door, or for a plate of soup to eat, sitting in the sunshine on the broad steps that lead down into the courtyard from the kitchen, an important department in this venerable homestead.

Within doors blazes a goodly fire on the hearth, a whole tree, standing on end, sending its smoke up a great chimney through which daylight is visible, and ready to give a comfortable greeting to Jean, or Gilles, or Romignières, when they come to talk about corn or sheep with the master, they sitting on the stone settles, built into the wall, he on one of those walnut armchairs standing between the kitchen table and the fireplace. See the great copper boilers standing around the wall, and those immense soup-tureens, ornamented with coarse painting, and the big dishes for the fish that they catch in the mill-pond once in three years.

There--we have looked long enough; pass through this long smoke-dried corridor to the dining-room, where masters and servants take their meals together, excepting on state occasions, the menials standing or sitting at the lower and of the unbleached cloth.

Now down this little flight of steps to the salon, which is all white, with a large sofa, some straw chairs, and a table with books on it. Yes--here {412} we pause--here are the objects of our search. In a faded tapestry arm-chair sits Maurice reading and Eugénie is near here. He looks but shadowy still, having just recovered from a fever, but the outline of his face is beautiful as he bends slightly over the book, the refined mouth, the expressive, drooping eyelids, the noble brow declaring him the worthy descendent of a long line of knights and gentlemen. One of these ancestors, Guérin de Montaigu, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, looks down upon us from the wall as we stand behind Maurice's chair, glancing, by the way, over his shoulder at the page he is reading, one of Barbey d'Aurevilly's brilliant articles. And now he reads aloud a striking passage, and Eugénie lifts her eyes and lets the work drop on her lap. What earnest, dovelike eyes they are! See how softly the hair parts on her forehead, passing over the pretty ear and falling in little curls at the back of her neck. The dress looks old-fashioned to us now, with its half-high, baby waste, and belt, and tucker, and her hair is dressed too high to be becoming; but there is the air of a refined lady in everything about her, and her face is like the face of a sweet, good little child.

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 pass 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 glass doors and arched window at the terrace, all green and blossoming with roses and acacias.

Here we are in an M. de Guérin's room, with its table and chairs loaded with books and with dust! That priè-Dieu was embroidered by Mme. de Guérin 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 Eugénie 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 pass. No doubt it was in this great state bed that Madame de Guérin died at midnight on the second of April, 1819. Eugénie had fallen asleep at her mother's feet, and as the spirit passed away from the long suffering body, M. de Guérin waked the little girl. "My God! 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 château. 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 Guérin of the seventeenth century.

Suites of small rooms lead from the hall--here is the room that Eugénie 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 château 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 Filicité de Lamennais drew about him several of the most promising intellects of France, [Footnote 64] with the view of establishing 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.

The Lamennais were a commercial family in Bordeaux, ennobled during the reign of Louis XVI. L'Abbé de Lamennais, the second son, refusing to become a merchant, retired to La Chênaie, and prepared himself for the priesthood.]

Here Lamennais passed 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 Guérin [Footnote 65] joined the little circle at La Chênaie, Lamennais had reached the turning point in his career. After preaching in his journal, with the assurance 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 grass 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."

"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 (fidèle) 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.

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A striking point in M. Sainte-Beuve's masterly analysis 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 pass in an instant.

To La Chênaie and to the influence of this wonderful being, this compound a pathetic gentleness and combative obstinacy, of magnetism and repulsion, Guérin came one afternoon early in the December of 1832. M. Féli, 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 fishing, 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 Chênaie suited Guérin'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 mass in the quiet little chapel below the terrace in the garden. "At breakfast," he wrote to Eugénie, "we have butter, and bread which we toast to make it more appetizing (toast was rather a luxury in those days on the continent), butter plays an important part in the meals. Dinner très confortable, with coffee and liqueurs when we have company, is seasoned with a rolling fire of wit, generally coming from M. Féli--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. Féli marching on ahead wearing a battered old straw hat such as great men love to shelter their illustrious 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.

What treasures of wit, humor, anecdote, analysis, 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 Chênaie on the 18th of December, 1832.

M. Féli 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, passionately devoted to Lamennais, and compassionately attentive to Guérin, regarding him, as did most of the inmates of La Chênaie, 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 circumstances of his unrequited love for Mlle. de Bayne, and laid the foundation of a friendship that lasted unbroken to the day of Guérin'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 Chênaie), 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, Guérin 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 Chênaie 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 passionate and fanatical worker. Guérin 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. Féli offered nothing but pitying tenderness, which Maurice accepted in dumb veneration. No wonder that, with the life at La Chênaie, all intimate intercourse between them ceased.

But it is a matter for surprise that, with all his powers of fascination, Lamennais inflicted (so far as we can learn the circumstances of the case) no permanent injury upon the faith of any one of his companions at La Chênaie. Lacordaire, Gerbet, Montalembert, and Bohrbacher became renowned champions of the church. Combalot, who had adored Lamennais, burst forth into a storm of invectives against him (as is the wont of disappointed idolaters), and then exclaimed, "Alas! I have wounded that heart into which I could have poured torrents of love!" Morvonnais and Marzan were ardent believers; Elie de Kertauguy and Guérin died Catholics. In short, Lamennais had devoted the prime of life to the church, and in those years had uttered words of wisdom never to be unsaid or forgotten. In spite of himself he must always be an eloquent advocate of the faith he deserted, a powerful enemy of the cause he espoused.

The time was already drawing near when the asylum should be closed to Maurice where he had found, in spite of disappointment and frequent depression, a happy, congenial home. On Easter Sunday, Lamennais celebrated his last mass and gave communion to all the little circle. "Who would have said" (we quote from Sainte-Beuve) "to those who clustered round the master, that he who had just given them communion, would never administer it again to anyone; that he would refuse it forevermore; and that he would soon adopt for his too true device an oak shattered by the storm, with the proud motto: I break but bend not! A Titan's device, à la Capanée!"

Early in the autumn of 1833, the Bishop of Rennes ordered the dissolution of Lamennais' religious community, and the pupils were removed to Ploërmel, where they continued their studies under the supervision of M. Jean de Lamennais. M. Féli disbanded his little army with the dignity of a defeated general, and then threw himself single-handed again into the fight. He changed his patrician name to F. Lamennais, and demanded of democracy (says one of his biographers), as he had demanded of the church, a wand-stroke that should free the world at once from suffering and oppression. His success may be judged by the political history of France in the last sixteen years. In religion he adopted "Christianisme législate," [Footnote 67] whatever that may be. "If," said he, "men feel so irresistibly impelled to unite themselves to God that they return to Christianity, let no one suppose that it can be to that Christianity which presents itself under the name of Catholicism."

In the revolution of '48 he thought he saw the birth of liberty; in the "Coup d'Etat" he received its death-blow in his own person. Baffled on every side, he betook himself to literature, and translated the "Divina Commedia;" then "feeling within him no life-sustaining thought," he died in his seventy-third year, after an illness of a few weeks, leaving these words in his will: "I will be buried among the poor, and like the poor. I will have nothing over my grave, not even a stone; nor will I have my body carried into any church." They laid him in Père la Chaise, and no word of blessing was uttered over his grave. Poor Lamennais! What magnificent possibilities were shattered in his fall!

And Maurice, what were his emotions when the door of La Chênaie dosed behind him?--the "little paradise" he called it, but then, poor soul, {417} anything that had escaped him for ever seemed to have been paradise. He suffered all that must be endured by those who have mistaken personal influence for a divine attraction. The novitate on which he had entered at La Chênaie with a certain reluctance, galled him beyond endurance at Ploërmel. "I would rather run the chance of a life of adventure than be garrotted by a rule," he said, and so he went out into the world again, feeling like a thing let loose in the universe, and by the blessing of Providence was received into the home of his unfailing friend, Hippolyte de la Morvonnais, who lived most delightfully on the coast of Brittany, at a place called Le Val de l'Arquenon.

Two months of simple country life, and of intercourse with Morvonnais, and with his wife, who exercised over Maurice the noblest and sweetest influence, gave him renewed strength to battle with life again. In the following extract from his journal, describing the last walk at Le Val, we see with what tenacity he clung to the past, and with what sadness he encountered the future: "Ten o'clock in the evening. Last walk, last visit to the sea, to the cliffs, to the whole grand scenery that has enchanted me for two months. Winter is smiling upon us with all the grace of spring, and giving us days that make birds sing and leaves burst forth on the rose-bushes in the garden, on the eglantine in the woods, on the honeysuckle climbing over rock and wall. About two o'clock we took the path that winds so gracefully through flowering broom and coarse cliff grass, skirting along wheat-fields, bending toward ravines, twisting in and out between hedge-rows, and at last boldly ascending the loftiest rocks. The object of our walk was a promontory that commands the Bay of Quatre-Vaux. A hundred feet below us shone the sea, breaking against the rocks with sounds that passed through our souls as they mounted to heaven. Toward the horizon the fishing-boats unfurled against the azure sky their dazzling sails, and as our eyes turned from this little fleet to the more numerous one that sailed singing nearer to us, an innumerable crowd of sea-birds fishing gaily, and gladdening our eyes with the sight of their bright plumage and graceful movements over the water--the birds, the sails, the lovely day and universal peace gave to the sea a festal beauty that filled my soul with glad enthusiasm in spite of the sad thoughts I had brought with me to our promontory; and then I looked with all my soul at headlands, rocks, and islands, trying to imprint them on my memory and carry them away with me. Coming home I trod religiously, and with regret at every step, the path that had so often led me to such beautiful thoughts, in such sweet company. The path is so charming when it reaches the coppice, and passes on among high hazel trees, and a thick, bushy hedge of boxwood! Then the joy that nature had bestowed upon me died away, and the melancholy of parting took possession of me. Tomorrow will make of sea, and woods, and coast, and all the charms I have enjoyed, a dream, a floating thought to me; and so, that I might carry away from these dear places as much as possible, and as if they could give themselves to me, I besought them to engrave their images upon my soul, to give me something of themselves that could never pass away; and I broke off branches of boxwood, bushes, and luxurious thickets, plunging my head into their depths to breathe in the wild perfumes they exhale, to penetrate into their very essence, and speak as it were heart to heart.

"The evening passed as usual in talking and reading. We recalled the happiness of past days; I traced a faint picture of them in this book, and we looked at it sadly, as at some dear, beautiful, dead face."

One more passage from his journal and we will leave Maurice de Guérin in Paris. Two years from the following date he was a fashionable man of the world, capable of vieing in {418} conversation with those marvels of wit and brilliancy, the talkers of Paris; but we have to do with him only as the banished recluse, the exile from La Chênaie.

"Paris, Feb., 1834. "O God! close my eyes, keep me from seeing all this multitude, whose presence rouses in me thoughts so bitter and discouraging. As I pass through it, let me be deaf to the sounds, inaccessible to the impressions that overwhelm me when I am in the crowd; set before my eyes some image, some vision of the things I love, a field, a valley, a moor, Le Cayla, Le Val, something in nature; I will walk with eyes fastened upon these dear forms, and pass on without a sense of suffering."