Louis Lambert

III

“Pauline! tell me if I can in any way have displeased you yesterday?  Throw off the pride of heart which inflicts on me the secret tortures that can be caused by one we love.  Scold me if you will!  Since yesterday, a vague, unutterable dread of having offended you pours grief on the life of feeling which you had made so sweet and so rich.  The lightest veil that comes between two souls sometimes grows to be a brazen wall.  There are no venial crimes in love!  If you have the very spirit of that noble sentiment, you must feel all its pangs, and we must be unceasingly careful not to fret each other by some heedless word.

“No doubt, my beloved treasure, if there is any fault, it is in me.  I cannot pride myself in the belief that I understand a woman’s heart, in all the expansion of its tenderness, all the grace of its devotedness; but I will always endeavor to appreciate the value of what you vouchsafe to show me of the secrets of yours.

  “Speak to me!  Answer me soon!  The melancholy into which we are
  thrown by the idea of a wrong done is frightful; it casts a shroud
  over life, and doubts on everything.

“I spent this morning sitting on the bank by the sunken road, gazing at the turrets of Villenoix, not daring to go to our hedge.  If you could imagine all I saw in my soul!  What gloomy visions passed before me under the gray sky, whose cold sheen added to my dreary mood!  I had dark presentiments!  I was terrified lest I should fail to make you happy.

“I must tell you everything, my dear Pauline.  There are moments when the spirit of vitality seems to abandon me.  I feel bereft of all strength.  Everything is a burden to me; every fibre of my body is inert, every sense is flaccid, my sight grows dim, my tongue is paralyzed, my imagination is extinct, desire is dead—­nothing survives but my mere human vitality.  At such times, though you were in all the splendor of your beauty, though you should lavish on me your subtlest smiles and tenderest words, an evil influence would blind me, and distort the most ravishing melody into discordant sounds.  At those times—­as I believe—­some argumentative demon stands before me, showing me the void beneath the most real possessions.  This pitiless demon mows down every flower, and mocks at the sweetest feelings, saying:  ’Well—­and then?’ He mars the fairest work by showing me its skeleton, and reveals the mechanism of things while hiding the beautiful results.

“At those terrible moments, when the evil spirit takes possession of me, when the divine light is darkened in my soul without my knowing the cause, I sit in grief and anguish, I wish myself deaf and dumb, I long for death to give me rest.  These hours of doubt and uneasiness are perhaps inevitable; at any rate, they teach me not to be proud after the flights which have borne me to the skies where I have gathered a full harvest of thoughts; for it is always after some long excursion in the vast fields of the intellect, and after the most luminous speculations, that I tumble, broken and weary, into this limbo.  At such a moment, my angel, a wife would double my love for her—­at any rate, she might.  If she were capricious, ailing, or depressed, she would need the comforting overflow of ingenious affection, and I should not have a glance to bestow on her.  It is my shame, Pauline, to have to tell you that at times I could weep with you, but that nothing could make me smile.

“A woman can always conceal her troubles; for her child, or for the man she loves, she can laugh in the midst of suffering.  And could not I, for you, Pauline, imitate the exquisite reserve of a woman?  Since yesterday I have doubted my own power.  If I could displease you once, if I failed once to understand you, I dread lest I should often be carried out of our happy circle by my evil demon.  Supposing I were to have many of those dreadful moods, or that my unbounded love could not make up for the dark hours of my life—­that I were doomed to remain such as I am?—­Fatal doubts!

“Power is indeed a fatal possession if what I feel within me is power.  Pauline, go!  Leave me, desert me!  Sooner would I endure every ill in life than endure the misery of knowing that you were unhappy through me.

“But, perhaps, the demon has had such empire over me only because I have had no gentle, white hands about me to drive him off.  No woman has ever shed on me the balm of her affection; and I know not whether, if love should wave his pinions over my head in these moments of exhaustion, new strength might not be given to my spirit.  This terrible melancholy is perhaps a result of my isolation, one of the torments of a lonely soul which pays for its hidden treasures with groans and unknown suffering.  Those who enjoy little shall suffer little; immense happiness entails unutterable anguish!

“How terrible a doom!  If it be so, must we not shudder for ourselves, we who are superhumanly happy?  If nature sells us everything at its true value, into what pit are we not fated to fall?  Ah! the most fortunate lovers are those who die together in the midst of their youth and love!  How sad it all is!  Does my soul foresee evil in the future?  I examine myself, wondering whether there is anything in me that can cause you a moment’s anxiety.  I love you too selfishly perhaps?  I shall be laying on your beloved head a burden heavy out of all proportion to the joy my love can bring to your heart.  If there dwells in me some inexorable power which I must obey—­if I am compelled to curse when you pray, if some dark thought coerces me when I would fain kneel at your feet and play as a child, will you not be jealous of that wayward and tricky spirit?

“You understand, dearest heart, that what I dread is not being wholly yours; that I would gladly forego all the sceptres and the palms of the world to enshrine you in one eternal thought, to see a perfect life and an exquisite poem in our rapturous love; to throw my soul into it, drown my powers, and wring from each hour the joys it has to give!

“Ah, my memories of love are crowding back upon me, the clouds of despair will lift.  Farewell.  I leave you now to be more entirely yours.  My beloved soul, I look for a line, a word that may restore my peace of mind.  Let me know whether I really grieved my Pauline, or whether some uncertain expression of her countenance misled me.  I could not bear to have to reproach myself after a whole life of happiness, for ever having met you without a smile of love, a honeyed word.  To grieve the woman I love—­Pauline, I should count it a crime.  Tell me the truth, do not put me off with some magnanimous subterfuge, but forgive me without cruelty.”

FRAGMENT.

  “Is so perfect an attachment happiness?  Yes, for years of
  suffering would not pay for an hour of love.

“Yesterday, your sadness, as I suppose, passed into my soul as swiftly as a shadow falls.  Were you sad or suffering?  I was wretched.  Whence came my distress?  Write to me at once.  Why did I not know it?  We are not yet completely one in mind.  At two leagues’ distance or at a thousand I ought to feel your pain and sorrows.  I shall not believe that I love you till my life is so bound up with yours that our life is one, till our hearts, our thoughts are one.  I must be where you are, see what you feel, feel what you feel, be with you in thought.  Did not I know, at once, that your carriage had been overthrown and you were bruised?  But on that day I had been with you, I had never left you, I could see you.  When my uncle asked me what made me turn so pale, I answered at once, ‘Mademoiselle de Villenoix had has a fall.’

“Why, then, yesterday, did I fail to read your soul?  Did you wish to hide the cause of your grief?  However, I fancied I could feel that you were arguing in my favor, though in vain, with that dreadful Salomon, who freezes my blood.  That man is not of our heaven.

“Why do you insist that our happiness, which has no resemblance to that of other people, should conform to the laws of the world?  And yet I delight too much in your bashfulness, your religion, your superstitions, not to obey your lightest whim.  What you do must be right; nothing can be purer than your mind, as nothing is lovelier than your face, which reflects your divine soul.

“I shall wait for a letter before going along the lanes to meet the sweet hour you grant me.  Oh! if you could know how the sight of those turrets makes my heart throb when I see them edged with light by the moon, our only confidante.”