XLI
MY MARRIAGE AND ITS RESULTS
I MARRIED Monsieur Lamessine. My father was not present at my wedding. He confessed to me later that he was so unhappy on that day that he wished to blow out his brains; but he thought, perhaps, I might have need of his protection some day, and he resigned himself to living.
Alas! I ought to have claimed his protection from the very first hours of my marriage, but I felt that if I spoke a word it would be a new anguish for my father, whose fears it would have confirmed; to my grandmother, whose scaffoldings of dreams it would have cast down, and to my dear aunts, whose peace it would have disturbed. I did not say a word until after my confinement, for which I went to Blérancourt, and where I was, so to speak, forced to confidences by my father, who divined all that I must have suffered.
When she knew herself a great-grandmother and that she could embrace her granddaughter’s child, my grandmother hoped to extend the agreement of living with me every winter at Paris to the house at Soissons, which we were to inhabit for eighteen months longer.
One day, when she had come to see me, to complete the secret dowry, the last installment of which she had engaged herself to pay only so soon as we should be settled in Paris, but which she anticipated, she said to my husband when breakfast was over:
“Do you know why I have brought such a large trunk?”
“Why, no, madame.”
“It is because I expect to pass the winter with you and Juliette.”
“Impossible, my dear madame.”
“What do you mean by impossible?”
“I made a mistake; I meant to say, you will never come.”
“Never, do you say?”
“You will never live in my house with your grandchild.”
“You are joking, monsieur.”
“No, I am speaking most seriously. You think Juliette is happy, she is not; we agree in nothing, nor about anything. If you should be a third party in our household, what would our unhappiness be then?”
“Is it true, my Juliette, that you are unhappy?” asked my grandmother.
“Yes,” I answered, choking with sobs, “I am as unhappy as one can possibly be.”
My grandmother rose from her seat suddenly, but she was obliged to lean against a chair to keep from falling. She tottered like a tree that is being uprooted.
“But your promises?” she said to my husband.
“They were necessary, my dear madame,” he replied, “only until you had finished keeping yours integrally.”
My grandmother opened the dining-room door without saying a word, took her cloak from the hall, and left our house. I went up to my room to put on my bonnet, and followed her. I did not know where to look for her. A man had come to get her trunk, which I saw put on the diligence. I learned later that a lady had taken a place for herself in it; that she had left the village in a carriage and was to take the diligence outside of the town. She had done likewise when she carried me off from Verberie.
I could not leave my daughter, whom I was nursing. I returned, and implored my husband to take the diligence, to rejoin my grandmother, and bring her back to me.
“Ah! no, indeed!” he said to me; “it has gone off too well! No drama, no quarrel. I am delighted.”
I could do nothing but give the driver of the diligence a letter for my poor grandmother, in which I told her all my sorrow. I added: “I am ‘tied’ in my turn, and I ‘browse’; but I shall untie myself as soon as I possibly can.”
And so my grandmother’s last and dearest romance ended cruelly. On returning to Chauny she starved herself to death. Knowing she had but a few days more to live, she sent for my father and asked him to pardon her for the harm she had done to him and to me, in marrying me against his wishes and mine.
My father forgave her, and implored her to do all that she could to live (alas! had she wished it, there was no longer time!), saying that I had need of all those who loved me, more than ever now.
Knowing I was nursing my child, she had not let me suspect anything about her tragical determination; on the contrary, in each one of her letters she reassured me, saying she did not take my husband’s words seriously. I did not even imagine that she was ill.
One night, about ten o’clock, I had just put my daughter in her crib, had returned to bed, and was about to go to sleep, when, by the light of a night lamp that was always burning, I saw my grandmother come into my room.
“Ah! grandmother, is it you?” I cried.
With a slow gesture, she put her hand up to her eyes. The sockets were empty! I jumped out of bed and went toward her—she had disappeared!
I rushed into my husband’s study, where he was writing.
“My grandmother, my grandmother, where is she? I have just seen her, with empty eyes, in my room!”
“You are crazy,” Monsieur Lamessine said; “your grandmother cannot be here. Your mother writes me that she is ill, and begs me, on account of your nursing, not to inform you of it.”
The next day I heard that my grandmother had died at the very hour she had appeared to me.
When I began to believe in religion again, this apparition of my grandmother was to me one of the strongest proofs of a hereafter.
The movement of her hand carried up to her eyes, whose sockets were empty, seemed to me to signify: “Blindness is death!”
I had remained blind too long, and always in my dreams I saw my grandmother again with the frightful gesture of her hand raised to her empty eyes.
I have never seen her again with this gesture since I wrote my Rêve sur le Divin, which, with my reborn soul, I dedicated to the newly born soul of my granddaughter, Juliette. It was a book written with deep feeling, the inspiration of which I believe to have come from my beloved grandmother.
The day after this strange apparition I left for Chauny with my daughter.
My mother, profoundly moved by her mother’s death and by the causes which had determined it, received me with tenderness and with tears of repentance. When my grandmother was dying, and when she implored my father’s forgiveness, she had exacted from her daughter a promise that she would at the same time ask her husband’s pardon for the harm she had done by her jealousy.
I passed some sad but peaceful weeks with my parents. My grandfather obtained my father’s and mother’s consent to come and live with them.
“It will not be for long,” he said to them; “for I can never live without my dear scolder, and you will bury me before this year is over.” He died eleven months after my grandmother.
From the day my grandmother left us, my father’s one thought was to replace her in my life, and he bestowed a double affection upon me. He encouraged me to work, aided me with his advice, and said to me:
“When your married life becomes even more intolerable to you than it is now, your mother and I will dedicate our lives to you. We will follow wherever you may lead us. Work, work, and become known. There is no other way by which a woman can gain her liberty than by affirming her personality.”
I worked while nursing and bringing up my daughter. I completed my education, very much developed in certain matters, very insufficient in others.
Then, one day, after some insignificant literary attempts, revolted at the insults Proudhon had thrown at Daniel Stern and George Sand in his book, La Justice dans la Révolution, I wrote my Anti-Proudhonian Ideas, and my real literary life began, with the record of which I shall some day continue these memoirs.