III

But I shall endure it for your sake.  My brother, you do not know

what happiness it is to love in heaven; to feel that you can

confess love purified by religion, love transported into the

highest heights of all, so that we are permitted to lose sight of

all but the soul.  If the doctrine and the spirit of the Saint to

whom we owe this refuge had not raised me above earth's anguish,

and caught me up and set me, far indeed beneath the Sphere

wherein she dwells, yet truly above this world, I should not have

seen you again.  But now I can see you, and hear your voice, and

remain calm"

The General broke in, "But, Antoinette, let me see you, you whom

I love passionately, desperately, as you could have wished me to

love you."

"Do not call me Antoinette, I implore you.  Memories of the past

hurt me.  You must see no one here but Sister Theresa, a creature

who trusts in the Divine mercy."  She paused for a little, and

then added, "You must control yourself, my brother.  Our Mother

would separate us without pity if there is any worldly passion in

your face, or if you allow the tears to fall from your eyes."

The General bowed his head to regain self-control; when he looked

up again he saw her face beyond the grating--the thin, white, but

still impassioned face of the nun.  All the magic charm of youth

that once bloomed there, all the fair contrast of velvet

whiteness and the colour of the Bengal rose, had given place to a

burning glow, as of a porcelain jar with a faint light shining

through it.  The wonderful hair in which she took such pride had

been shaven; there was a bandage round her forehead and about her

face.  An ascetic life had left dark traces about the eyes, which

still sometimes shot out fevered glances; their ordinary calm

expression was but a veil.  In a few words, she was but the ghost

of her former self.

"Ah! you that have come to be my life, you must come out of this

tomb!  You were mine; you had no right to give yourself, even to

God.  Did you not promise me to give up all at the least command

from me?  You may perhaps think me worthy of that promise now

when you hear what I have done for you.  I have sought you all

through the world.  You have been in my thoughts at every moment

for five years; my life has been given to you.  My friends, very

powerful friends, as you know, have helped with all their might

to search every convent in France, Italy, Spain, Sicily, and

America.  Love burned more brightly for every vain search.  Again

and again I made long journeys with a false hope; I have wasted

my life and the heaviest throbbings of my heart in vain under

many a dark convent wall.  I am not speaking of a faithfulness

that knows no bounds, for what is it?--nothing compared with the

infinite longings of my love.  If your remorse long ago was

sincere, you ought not to hesitate to follow me today."

"You forget that I am not free."

"The Duke is dead," he answered quickly.

Sister Theresa flushed red.

"May heaven be open to him!" she cried with a quick rush of

feeling.  "He was generous to me.--But I did not mean such ties;

it was one of my sins that I was ready to break them all without

scruple--for you."

"Are you speaking of your vows?" the General asked, frowning.

"I did not think that anything weighed heavier with your heart

than love.  But do not think twice of it, Antoinette; the Holy

Father himself shall absolve you of your oath.  I will surely go

to Rome, I will entreat all the powers of earth; if God could

come down from heaven, I would"

"Do not blaspheme."

"So do not fear the anger of God.  Ah! I would far rather hear

that you would leave your prison for me; that this very night you

would let yourself down into a boat at the foot of the cliffs.

And we would go away to be happy somewhere at the world's end, I

know not where.  And with me at your side, you should come back

to life and health under the wings of love."

"You must not talk like this," said Sister Theresa; "you do

not know what you are to me now.  I love you far better than I

ever loved you before.  Every day I pray for you; I see you with

other eyes.  Armand, if you but knew the happiness of giving

yourself up, without shame, to a pure friendship which God

watches over!  You do not know what joy it is to me to pray for

heaven's blessing on you.  I never pray for myself:  God will do

with me according to His will; but, at the price of my soul, I

wish I could be sure that you are happy here on earth, and that

you will be happy hereafter throughout all ages.  My eternal life

is all that trouble has left me to offer up to you.  I am old now

with weeping; I am neither young nor fair; and in any case, you

could not respect the nun who became a wife; no love, not even

motherhood, could give me absolution...  What can you say to

outweigh the uncounted thoughts that have gathered in my heart

during the past five years, thoughts that have changed, and worn,

and blighted it?  I ought to have given a heart less sorrowful to

God."

"What can I say?  Dear Antoinette, I will say this, that I love

you; that affection, love, a great love, the joy of living in

another heart that is ours, utterly and wholly ours, is so rare a

thing and so hard to find, that I doubted you, and put you to

sharp proof; but now, today, I love you, Antoinette, with all my

soul's strength...  If you will follow me into solitude, I

will hear no voice but yours, I will see no other face."

"Hush, Armand!  You are shortening the little time that we may

be together here on earth."

"Antoinette, will you come with me?"

"I am never away from you.  My life is in your heart, not

through the selfish ties of earthly happiness, or vanity, or

enjoyment; pale and withered as I am, I live here for you, in the

breast of God.  As God is just, you shall be happy"

"Words, words all of it!  Pale and withered?  How if I want you?

How if I cannot be happy without you?  Do you still think of

nothing but duty with your lover before you?  Is he never to come

first and above all things else in your heart?  In time past you

put social success, yourself, heaven knows what, before him; now

it is God, it is the welfare of my soul!  In Sister Theresa I

find the Duchess over again, ignorant of the happiness of love,

insensible as ever, beneath the semblance of sensibility.  You do

not love me; you have never loved me"

"Oh, my brother!"

"You do not wish to leave this tomb.  You love my soul, do you

say?  Very well, through you it will be lost forever.  I shall

make away with myself"

"Mother!" Sister Theresa called aloud in Spanish, "I have lied

to you; this man is my lover!"

The curtain fell at once.  The General, in his stupor, scarcely

heard the doors within as they clanged.

"Ah! she loves me still!" he cried, understanding all the

sublimity of that cry of hers.  "She loves me still.  She must

be carried off..."

The General left the island, returned to headquarters, pleaded

ill-health, asked for leave of absence, and forthwith took his

departure for France.

And now for the incidents which brought the two personages in

this Scene into their present relation to each other.

The thing known in France as the Faubourg Saint-Germain is

neither a Quarter, nor a sect, nor an institution, nor anything

else that admits of a precise definition.  There are great houses

in the Place Royale, the Faubourg Saint-Honore, and the Chaussee

d'Antin, in any one of which you may breathe the same atmosphere

of Faubourg Saint-Germain.  So, to begin with, the whole Faubourg

is not within the Faubourg.  There are men and women born far

enough away from its influences who respond to them and take

their place in the circle; and again there are others, born

within its limits, who may yet be driven forth forever.  For the

last forty years the manners, and customs, and speech, in a word,

the tradition of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, has been to Paris

what the Court used to be in other times; it is what the Hotel

Saint-Paul was to the fourteenth century; the Louvre to the

fifteenth; the Palais, the Hotel Rambouillet, and the Place

Royale to the sixteenth; and lastly, as Versailles was to the

seventeenth and the eighteenth.

Just as the ordinary workaday Paris will always centre about some

point; so, through all periods of history, the Paris of the

nobles and the upper classes converges towards some particular

spot.  It is a periodically recurrent phenomenon which presents

ample matter for reflection to those who are fain to observe or

describe the various social zones; and possibly an enquiry into

the causes that bring about this centralisation may do more than

merely justify the probability of this episode; it may be of

service to serious interests which some day will be more deeply

rooted in the commonwealth, unless, indeed, experience is as

meaningless for political parties as it is for youth.

In every age the great nobles, and the rich who always ape the

great nobles, build their houses as far as possible from crowded

streets.  When the Duc d'Uzes built his splendid hotel in the Rue

Montmartre in the reign of Louis XIV, and set the fountain at his

gates--for which beneficent action, to say nothing of his other

virtues, he was held in such veneration that the whole quarter

turned out in a body to follow his funeral--when the Duke, I say,

chose this site for his house, he did so because that part of

Paris was almost deserted in those days.  But when the

fortifications were pulled down, and the market gardens beyond

the line of the boulevards began to fill with houses, then the

d'Uzes family left their fine mansion, and in our time it was

occupied by a banker.  Later still, the noblesse began to find

themselves out of their element among shopkeepers, left the Place

Royale and the centre of Paris for good, and crossed the river to

breathe freely in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where palaces were

reared already about the great hotel built by Louis XIV for the

Duc de Maine--the Benjamin among his legitimated offspring.  And

indeed, for people accustomed to a stately life, can there be

more unseemly surroundings than the bustle, the mud, the street

cries, the bad smells, and narrow thoroughfares of a populous

quarter?  The very habits of life in a mercantile or

manufacturing district are completely at variance with the lives

of nobles.  The shopkeeper and artisan are just going to bed when

the great world is thinking of dinner; and the noisy stir of life

begins among the former when the latter have gone to rest.  Their

day's calculations never coincide; the one class represents the

expenditure, the other the receipts.  Consequently their manners

and customs are diametrically opposed. 

Nothing contemptuous is intended by this statement.  An

aristocracy is in a manner the intellect of the social system, as

the middle classes and the proletariat may be said to be its

organising and working power.  It naturally follows that these

forces are differently situated; and of their antagonism there is

bred a seeming antipathy produced by the performance of different

functions, all of them, however, existing for one common end.

Such social dissonances are so inevitably the outcome of any

charter of the constitution, that however much a Liberal may be

disposed to complain of them, as of treason against those sublime

ideas with which the ambitious plebeian is apt to cover his

designs, he would none the less think it a preposterous notion

that M. le Prince de Montmorency, for instance, should continue

to live in the Rue Saint-Martin at the corner of the street which

bears that nobleman's name; or that M. le Duc de Fitz-James,

descendant of the royal house of Scotland, should have his hotel

at the angle of the Rue Marie Stuart and the Rue Montorgueil.

Sint ut sunt, aut non sint, the grand words of the Jesuit, might

be taken as a motto by the great in all countries.  These social

differences are patent in all ages; the fact is always accepted

by the people; its "reasons of state" are self-evident; it is

at once cause and effect, a principle and a law.  The common

sense of the masses never deserts them until demagogues stir them

up to gain ends of their own; that common sense is based on the

verities of social order; and the social order is the same

everywhere, in Moscow as in London, in Geneva as in Calcutta.

Given a certain number of families of unequal fortune in any

given space, you will see an aristocracy forming under your eyes;

there will be the patricians, the upper classes, and yet other

ranks below them.  Equality may be a RIGHT, but no power on earth

can convert it into FACT.  It would be a good thing for France if

this idea could be popularised.  The benefits of political

harmony are obvious to the least intelligent classes.  Harmony

is, as it were, the poetry of order, and order is a matter of

vital importance to the working population.  And what is order,

reduced to its simplest expression, but the agreement of things

among themselves--unity, in short?  Architecture, music, and

poetry, everything in France, and in France more than in any

other country, is based upon this principle; it is written upon

the very foundations of her clear accurate language, and a

language must always be the most infallible index of national

character.  In the same way you may note that the French popular

airs are those most calculated to strike the imagination, the

best-modulated melodies are taken over by the people; clearness

of thought, the intellectual simplicity of an idea attracts them;

they like the incisive sayings that hold the greatest number of

ideas.

France is the one country in the world where a little phrase may

bring about a great revolution.  Whenever the masses have risen,

it has been to bring men, affairs, and principles into agreement.

No nation has a clearer conception of that idea of unity which

should permeate the life of an aristocracy; possibly no other

nation has so intelligent a comprehension of a political

necessity; history will never find her behind the time.  France

has been led astray many a time, but she is deluded, woman-like,

by generous ideas, by a glow of enthusiasm which at first

outstrips sober reason.

So, to begin with, the most striking characteristic of the

Faubourg is the splendour of its great mansions, its great

gardens, and a surrounding quiet in keeping with princely

revenues drawn from great estates.

And what is this distance set between a class and a whole

metropolis but visible and outward expression of the widely

different attitude of mind which must inevitably keep them apart?

The position of the head is well defined in every organism.  If

by any chance a nation allows its head to fall at its feet, it is

pretty sure sooner or later to discover that this is a suicidal

measure; and since nations have no desire to perish, they set to

work at once to grow a new head.  If they lack the strength for

this, they perish as Rome perished, and Venice, and so many other

states.

This distinction between the upper and lower spheres of social

activity, emphasised by differences in their manner of living,

necessarily implies that in the highest aristocracy there is real

worth and some distinguishing merit.  In any state, no matter

what form of "government" is affected, so soon as the patrician

class fails to maintain that complete superiority which is the

condition of its existence, it ceases to be a force, and is

pulled down at once by the populace.  The people always wish to

see money, power, and initiative in their leaders, hands, hearts,

and heads; they must be the spokesmen, they must represent the

intelligence and the glory of the nation.  Nations, like women,

love strength in those who rule them; they cannot give love

without respect; they refuse utterly to obey those of whom they

do not stand in awe.  An aristocracy fallen into contempt is a

roi faineant, a husband in petticoats; first it ceases to be

itself, and then it ceases to be.

And in this way the isolation of the great, the sharply marked

distinction in their manner of life, or in a word, the general

custom of the patrician caste is at once the sign of a real

power, and their destruction so soon as that power is lost.  The

Faubourg Saint-Germain failed to recognise the conditions of its

being, while it would still have been easy to perpetuate its

existence, and therefore was brought low for a time.  The

Faubourg should have looked the facts fairly in the face, as the

English aristocracy did before them; they should have seen that

every institution has its climacteric periods, when words lose

their old meanings, and ideas reappear in a new guise, and the

whole conditions of politics wear a changed aspect, while the

underlying realities undergo no essential alteration.