OTHER RESULTS
The news of Mademoiselle Cormon's choice stabbed poor Athanase Granson to the heart; but he showed no outward sign of the terrible agitation within him.When he first heard of the marriage he was at the house of the chief-justice, du Ronceret, where his mother was playing boston.
Madame Granson looked at her son in a mirror, and thought him pale;but he had been so all day, for a vague rumor of the matter had already reached him.
Mademoiselle Cormon was the card on which Athanase had staked his life; and the cold presentiment of a catastrophe was already upon him.
When the soul and the imagination have magnified a misfortune and made it too heavy for the shoulders and the brain to bear; when a hope long cherished, the realization of which would pacify the vulture feeding on the heart, is balked, and the man has faith neither in himself, despite his powers, nor in the future, despite of the Divine power,--then that man is lost.Athanase was a fruit of the Imperial system of education.Fatality, the Emperor's religion, had filtered down from the throne to the lowest ranks of the army and the benches of the lyceums.Athanase sat still, with his eyes fixed on Madame du Ronceret's cards, in a stupor that might so well pass for indifference that Madame Granson herself was deceived about his feelings.This apparent unconcern explained her son's refusal to make a sacrifice for this marriage of his LIBERAL opinions,--the term "liberal" having lately been created for the Emperor Alexander by, I think, Madame de Stael, through the lips of Benjamin Constant.
After that fatal evening the young man took to rambling among the picturesque regions of the Sarthe, the banks of which are much frequented by sketchers who come to Alencon for points of view.
Windmills are there, and the river is gay in the meadows.The shores of the Sarthe are bordered with beautiful trees, well grouped.Though the landscape is flat, it is not without those modest graces which distinguish France, where the eye is never wearied by the brilliancy of Oriental skies, nor saddened by constant fog.The place is solitary.In the provinces no one pays much attention to a fine view, either because provincials are blases on the beauty around them, or because they have no poesy in their souls.If there exists in the provinces a mall, a promenade, a vantage-ground from which a fine view can be obtained, that is the point to which no one goes.Athanase was fond of this solitude, enlivened by the sparkling water, where the fields were the first to green under the earliest smiling of the springtide sun.Those persons who saw him sitting beneath a poplar, and who noticed the vacant eye which he turned to them, would say to Madame Granson:--"Something is the matter with your son."
"I know what it is," the mother would reply; hinting that he was meditating over some great work.
Athanase no longer took part in politics: he ceased to have opinions;but he appeared at times quite gay,--gay with the satire of those who think to insult a whole world with their own individual scorn.This young man, outside of all the ideas and all the pleasures of the provinces, interested few persons; he was not even an object of curiosity.If persons spoke of him to his mother, it was for her sake, not his.There was not a single soul in Alencon that sympathized with his; not a woman, not a friend came near to dry his tears; they dropped into the Sarthe.If the gorgeous Suzanne had happened that way, how many young miseries might have been born of the meeting! for the two would surely have loved each other.
She did come, however.Suzanne's ambition was early excited by the tale of a strange adventure which had happened at the tavern of the More,--a tale which had taken possession of her childish brain.AParisian woman, beautiful as the angels, was sent by Fouche to entangle the Marquis de Montauran, otherwise called "The Gars," in a love-affair (see "The Chouans").She met him at the tavern of the More on his return from an expedition to Mortagne; she cajoled him, made him love her, and then betrayed him.That fantastic power--the power of beauty over mankind; in fact, the whole story of Marie de Verneuil and the Gars--dazzled Suzanne; she longed to grow up in order to play upon men.Some months after her hasty departure she passed through her native town with an artist on his way to Brittany.She wanted to see Fougeres, where the adventure of the Marquis de Montauran culminated, and to stand upon the scene of that picturesque war, the tragedies of which, still so little known, had filled her childish mind.Besides this, she had a fancy to pass through Alencon so elegantly equipped that no one could recognize her; to put her mother above the reach of necessity, and also to send to poor Athanase, in a delicate manner, a sum of money,--which in our age is to genius what in the middle ages was the charger and the coat of mail that Rebecca conveyed to Ivanhoe.
