The Collection of Antiquities

If the old couple to whom this epistle was addressed had followed out Chesnel’s instructions, they would have been compelled to take three private detectives into their pay.  And yet there was ample wisdom shown in Chesnel’s choice of a depositary.  A banker pays money to any one accredited to him so long as the money lasts; whereas, Victurnien was obliged, every time that he was in want of money, to make a personal visit to the notary, who was quite sure to use the right of remonstrance.

Victurnien heard that he was to be allowed two thousand francs every month, and thought that he betrayed his joy.  He knew nothing of Paris.  He fancied that he could keep up princely state on such a sum.

Next day he started on his journey.  All the benedictions of the Collection of Antiquities went with him; he was kissed by the dowagers; good wishes were heaped on his head; his old father, his aunt, and Chesnel went with him out of the town, tears filling the eyes of all three.  The sudden departure supplied material for conversation for several evenings; and what was more, it stirred the rancorous minds of the salon du Croisier to the depths.  The forage-contractor, the president, and others who had vowed to ruin the d’Esgrignons, saw their prey escaping out of their hands.  They had based their schemes of revenge on a young man’s follies, and now he was beyond their reach.

The tendency in human nature, which often gives a bigot a rake for a daughter, and makes a frivolous woman the mother of a narrow pietist; that rule of contraries, which, in all probability, is the “resultant” of the law of similarities, drew Victurnien to Paris by a desire to which he must sooner or later have yielded.  Brought up as he had been in the old-fashioned provincial house, among the quiet, gentle faces that smiled upon him, among sober servants attached to the family, and surroundings tinged with a general color of age, the boy had only seen friends worthy of respect.  All of those about him, with the exception of the Chevalier, had example of venerable age, were elderly men and women, sedate of manner, decorous and sententious of speech.  He had been petted by those women in gray gowns and embroidered mittens described by Blondet.  The antiquated splendors of his father’s house were as little calculated as possible to suggest frivolous thoughts; and lastly, he had been educated by a sincerely religious abbe, possessed of all the charm of old age, which has dwelt in two centuries, and brings to the Present its gifts of the dried roses of experience, the faded flowers of the old customs of its youth.  Everything should have combined to fashion Victurnien to serious habits; his whole surroundings from childhood bade him continue the glory of a historic name, by taking his life as something noble and great; and yet Victurnien listened to dangerous promptings.

For him, his noble birth was a stepping-stone which raised him above other men.  He felt that the idol of Noblesse, before which they burned incense at home, was hollow; he had come to be one of the commonest as well as one of the worst types from a social point of view—­a consistent egoist.  The aristocratic cult of the ego simply taught him to follow his own fancies; he had been idolized by those who had the care of him in childhood, and adored by the companions who shared in his boyish escapades, and so he had formed a habit of looking and judging everything as it affected his own pleasure; he took it as a matter of course when good souls saved him from the consequences of his follies, a piece of mistaken kindness which could only lead to his ruin.  Victurnien’s early training, noble and pious though it was, had isolated him too much.  He was out of the current of the life of the time, for the life of a provincial town is certainly not in the main current of the age; Victurnien’s true destiny lifted him above it.  He had learned to think of an action, not as it affected others, nor relatively, but absolutely from his own point of view.  Like despots, he made the law to suit the circumstance, a system which works in the lives of prodigal sons the same confusion which fancy brings into art.

Victurnien was quick-sighted, he saw clearly and without illusion, but he acted on impulse, and unwisely.  An indefinable flaw of character, often seen in young men, but impossible to explain, led him to will one thing and do another.  In spite of an active mind, which showed itself in unexpected ways, the senses had but to assert themselves, and the darkened brain seemed to exist no longer.  He might have astonished wise men; he was capable of setting fools agape.  His desires, like a sudden squall of bad weather, overclouded all the clear and lucid spaces of his brain in a moment; and then, after the dissipations which he could not resist, he sank, utterly exhausted in body, heart, and mind, into a collapsed condition bordering upon imbecility.  Such a character will drag a man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him to the highest heights of political power if he has some stern friend to keep him in hand.  Neither Chesnel, nor the lad’s father, nor Aunt Armande had fathomed the depths of a nature so nearly akin on many sides to the poetic temperament, yet smitten with a terrible weakness at its core.