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.Then, in one of those intervals when suffer-ing is suspended, and the exhaustion of senses overwhelmed grantsrelease and strength to the soul, she exclaimed: I, your wife! Ah, my dear love, that word, that happiness, thatprize, they were not for me.I am dying and I deserve to.O God ofmy heart! O you whom I have sacrificed to infernal demons, it is allover.I have been punished.Live and be happy.These tender, terrible words made no sense, but they filled everyheart with fear and pity.She had the courage to explain herself.Eachword made all those present shudder in disbelief, and with pain andcompassion.They all joined in execrating the man of power who hadremedied a horrible injustice only by the perpetration of a crime, andwho had forced the most respectable innocence into becoming hisaccomplice. Who, you? Guilty? said her lover. No, that you are not.Crime isin the heart alone, and yours belongs to virtue and to me.He followed up this sentiment with words which seemed to bringthe fair Saint-Yves back to life.She felt consoled, and was surprisedto be still loved.Old Gordon would have condemned her in the dayswhen he was but a Jansenist; now, having learnt wisdom, heesteemed her and wept.In the midst of all these tears and apprehensions, while everyheart was full of the danger this very dear girl was in, while all wasconsternation, a messenger from the court was announced.Amessenger! And from whom? And why? He was come from theKing s confessor for the Prior of the Mountain.It was not Father LaChaise who wrote: it was his valet, Friar Vadbled, a most importantperson at that time and the man who communicated the reverendfather s wishes to the archbishops, the man who gave audiences, whopromised livings, and who sometimes issued lettres de cachet.He waswriting to the Abbé of the Mountain that  His Reverence wasinformed of the adventures of his nephew, that his imprisonmenthad simply been a mistake, that minor mishaps like this often hap-pened, that there was no need to be concerned about it and, lastly,that he was agreeable that he, the Prior, should come the followingday and present his nephew to him, that he should bring good Gordonwith him, that he, Friar Vadbled, would introduce them to HisReverence and to Monseigneur de Louvois, who would have a wordwith them in his antechamber.250 The IngenuHe added that the story of the Ingenu and his fight against theEnglish had been told to the King, that the King would be certain todeign to notice him when he passed by in the gallery, and that hemight perhaps even nod to him.The letter ended by expressingthe hope, which he had been led to entertain, that all the ladies ofthe court would make a point of inviting his nephew to their levees,and that several of them would say  Good day, M.Ingenu to him;and that assuredly he would be a subject of conversation at theroyal supper-table.The letter was signed:  Your affectionate FriarVadbled, SJ.The Prior having read the letter out aloud, his nephew, who wasfurious but managing for the moment to restrain his anger, saidnothing to the bearer.Instead, turning to his companion inmisfortune, he asked him what he thought of the style.Gordon answered him: There you are, that s how they treat men like monkeys! First theybeat them and then they make them dance to their own tune.The Ingenu, his true character showing itself once more, as italways does at moments of great upheaval in the soul, tore the letterinto little pieces and threw them in the face of the messenger: There s my answer.His uncle was horrified and had visions of a thunderbolt andtwenty lettres de cachet raining down upon him.He quickly went andwrote a letter to excuse as best he could what he took to be a youngman s quick temper, but which was actually the outburst of afine soul.But matters of more sorrowful concern were taking possession ofall their hearts.That fair unfortunate, Saint-Yves, could sensealready that her end was nigh.She was calm, but it was that awfulcalm of prostration when nature no longer has the strength to fight. O my dear love! she said in a faltering voice,  death is punishingme for my weakness.But I die with the consolation of knowing thatyou are free.I adored you even as I betrayed you, and I adore youeven as I bid you an eternal adieu.Not for her some vain show of strength.The paltry glory ofhaving a few neighbours say  she was courageous in death nevercrossed her mind.Who at the age of twenty can lose her lover, herlife, and what is called her  honour , without regret and withoutanguish? She felt the full horror of her situation, and communicatedThe Ingenu 251it in dying words and glances of the kind that speak with so muchauthority.And then like the others she wept, in the moments whenshe still had strength enough to weep.Let others seek to praise the ostentatious deaths of those whoenter destruction with impassivity.That is the fate of animals.Wedie like them with indifference only when age or illness makes ussimilar to them in the dullness of our organs.Whoever feels a greatloss feels a great regret.If he should repress it, he is carrying vanityinto the very arms of death.When the fateful moment arrived, all those present cried out andwept.The Ingenu lost the use of his senses: people of strong char-acter feel things much more violently than others when they have atender heart.Good Gordon knew him well enough to fear that hemight kill himself when he recovered consciousness.They removedevery possible weapon.The unfortunate young man noticed.He saidto his family and to Gordon, without so much as a tear or a groan, orany other apparent emotion: Do you really think that anyone on earth has the right or thepower to stop me putting an end to my own life?Gordon was careful not to rehearse the tiresome platitudes withwhich people try to prove that it is not permissible to exercise one sfreedom to cease living merely because one is in terrible pain; thatone should not go out simply because one cannot stand being athome any more; that man is on earth as a soldier at his post  as if itwere of any consequence to the Being of Beings whether a fewassembled bits of matter were in one place or another: so manypowerless reasons that firm, considered despair disdains to hear, andto which Cato s only answer was a dagger blow.The fearful, gloomy silence of the Ingenu, his dark eyes, his trem-bling lips, and the shuddering of his body filled the souls of theonlookers with that mixture of compassion and dread which holdsevery faculty of the soul in thrall, which makes all speech impossible,and manifests itself only in single words and broken phrases.Thelandlady and her family had arrived.They trembled at his despair.They kept watch over him and observed his every movement.Already the icy corpse of fair Saint-Yves had been taken downstairs,away from the gaze of her lover, who seemed still to be looking forher although he was no longer in a state to see anything at all [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]