The weight of the name

Chapter 4

"Life?" he repeated in a voice that had suddenly become dull and harsh; "what do you mean by that? But what need have I to ask you? As if, ever since my youth, I had not seen that same barrier always standing in the path of all my impulses: my name, always my name, again my name! I shall end by cursing it! I am a grand seigneur, you say. Say rather a pariah, before whom so many avenues were closed, when he was twenty years old, because he is called by that great name; and the woman he loves won't have him because of it! Ah! how truly I shall have known and lived the tragedy of the noble,—since my evil fate decrees that I am a noble,—that paralysis of the youthful being, quivering with life, hungry for action, because of a past which was not his own, suffocation by prejudices which he does not even share.—Valentine, say that you do not love me. I shall be terribly unhappy, but I shall not feel what I felt just now, and with such violence,—a fresh outbreak of that old revolt through which I have suffered so keenly, which I have always fought within myself, and which goes so far, at times, as downright hatred of my caste. Yes, I have been, I am now sometimes, very near hating it, and that is so painful to me, for I belong to that caste, in spite of everything. It holds me a prisoner. I know its good qualities. I have its pride at certain moments, and at others, this one for instance, it is a perfect horror to me!"

"Do not speak so, do not feel so," pleaded Madame Olier. "You frighten me when I see you so unjust, not only to me,—I have forgiven you,—but to your own destiny. It is tempting God. You speak of barriers, of prison, of suffocation. For my part, I think of all the privileges you received at your birth, and first of all, and greatest of all, that of being so easily an example to others. If you could have heard the remarks that were made about you when you came to Saint-Mihiel, you would appreciate more justly the value of that name which you all but blasphemed just now—and for what reason? I heard those remarks, and I am still proud for you. 'He's the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, and he works! He'll have three hundred thousand francs a year and he passed his examinations brilliantly! He's a good fellow. He treats people well. He has all the qualities of a leader of men.'—You call nobles pariahs, because they arouse much envy. But when they are worthy of their rank, what influence they can exert! And all this is no longer of any account, because you can't bend to your will the will of a poor woman, who, in ten years, will be passée! And you will say of her then, if you recognize her: 'Where were my wits when I thought that I loved her so dearly?'"

"And if, ten years hence,—I still love her," said the young man, "and if I have employed those ten years in regretting her! Suppose it should happen that that woman's refusal were coincident with one of those crises as a result of which one's whole life is transformed? Suppose I had reached one of those times when a man has to make a decision of tragical importance to himself, and when he needs to know upon what support he can count?"

He seemed to hesitate, and then continued in the altered tone of one who, having just abandoned himself to the tumult of his emotions, puts constraint upon himself and resolves to confine himself to a formal statement of facts: "You will understand me in a moment. I came here with the idea of beginning with this. Your presence moved me too deeply! I have told you that I was able to obtain only a very short leave of absence, forty-eight hours, and that with difficulty. Our new colonel does not agree with you about nobles. He is strict and harsh with them. He made this remark about me the other day, because of my title and my 'de': 'I don't like names with currents of air.' Under the circumstances he was not wrong in requiring me to return to-morrow night. Within a few days, we know from official sources, there will be two church inventories made in the district. And they anticipate resistance."

"Is it possible?" cried Valentine, clasping her hands. "Since the law of separation was passed, I have never read about a scene like those at Paramé and Saint-Servan without trembling lest you should be caught in one of those cases of conscience of which so many gallant officers have been the victims! I thought that at Saint-Mihiel everything had passed off quietly and that the troops had not had to interfere. Besides, they so rarely use in that business the arm of the service to which you belong."

"They will use it this time," Landri replied; "we have been warned. It is logical. Either the chasseurs or we will have to serve. Those two regiments contain a considerable number of people who bear names 'with currents of air,' one of whom is that same Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, who 'works,' who 'treats people well,' who 'has all the qualities of a leader of men.' It is an excellent opportunity to break his ribs and those of some others of his sort! The pretext is all ready: the two churches to be inventoried are those of Hugueville-en-Plaine, and the Sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Montmartin. In the former there is an old priest, revered for fifty leagues around, who has declared from the pulpit that he will not yield except to force. You know the devotion of the department to the Madonna of Montmartin. It is essential to act quickly, very quickly, so that the peasants may not have time to collect. Hugueville and Montmartin are a long way from Saint-Mihiel. The cavalry is already selected. If the dragoons march, as my term of duty comes at the end of the week, I have an excellent chance of being in the affair."

"My poor, poor friend!" said the young woman, enveloping the officer in a glance eloquent with the affection which she had sworn so often to conceal from him; "so you, too, are going to be forced to leave the army, of which you are so fond, and in which so fine a place is in store for you—"

"I shall not leave it," he interrupted; and his face was, as it were, frozen in an expression so stern that Valentine was amazed by it.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"That I have questioned myself closely, and have not found in my conscience what my comrades of whom you speak have found in theirs. They were believers, and I—you know too well that I have doubts which I do not parade. I shall have to execute certain orders with repugnance. But repugnance is not scruple. I shall go ahead. I shall not leave the army."

"Even if it is necessary to order your men to break down the door of a church?"

"I shall give them that order."

"You!" she cried. "You—"

"Finish your sentence," he rejoined with a still more gloomy expression. "'You, a Claviers-Grandchamp!' You dare not say the word. You think it, you have it on the end of your lips. In another than myself, you would consider it perfectly natural—you above all, who know our profession—that he should execute, in my frame of mind, a military order, and that he should see, in the taking possession of the church of Hugueville or Montmartin, simply a matter of duty to be done. In me you do not admit it. Why? Again, because of my name! And you are surprised that I break out in explosions like that of a moment ago against a servitude of which I alone know the weight!—Oh, well!" he continued, with increasing wrath, "it is precisely because I am a Claviers-Grandchamp that I don't propose to leave the army. I propose to do my duty. You hear, to do my duty, not to be a useless idler, a rich man with a most authentic coat-of-arms on his carriages. I do not propose, for the purpose of handing down an example for which I am not responsible, to undo the work of my whole youth, to become an 'Émigré' within the country, like so many of my kinsmen, so many of my friends,—like my father!"

"You are not going to deny him, him too!" she implored. "You loved him, you admired him so much!"

"I love him and admire him still," replied the young man in a tone of the utmost earnestness; "yes, I admire him. No one knows better than I his great qualities and what he might have been. What a soldier! He proved it during the war. What a diplomatist! What an administrator! What a Councillor of State! And he is nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing! Why, it is the whole tragedy of my thoughts, the evidence of my father's magnificent gifts, paralyzed by his name, solely by his name! Since I have become observant, I have seen that he, intelligent, generous, straightforward as he is, makes no use of his energies, takes part in none of the activities of his time. And yet there is a contemporaneous France. He is in it, but not of it. It will have none of him, who will have none of it. He will have passed his youth, his maturity, his old age, in what? In taking part in a pompous parade of the ancien régime, what with his receptions at Paris and Grandchamp, his stag-hunting, and the playing the patron to an enormous and utterly unprofitable clientage, of low and high estate, who live on his luxury or his income. I felt the worthlessness of all that too soon; he will never feel it. He is deceived by a mirage. He is close to a time when the nobility was still an aristocracy. My grandfather was twenty-six years old in 1827, when he succeeded to my great-grandfather's peerage, and my great-grandfather was colonel of the dragoons of Claviers before '89. For there were dragoons of Claviers-Grandchamp as there were of Custine and Jarnac, Belzunce and Lanan. They are far away. But in my father's eyes all those things so entirely uprooted and done away with are still realities. He is in touch with them. He has known those who saw them. As a little boy he played on the knees of old ladies who had been at court at Versailles. One would say that that past fascinates him more and more as it recedes. To me it is death, and I desired to live. That was the motive that led me to enter the army. Indeed, I had no choice. All other careers were closed to the future Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp.—These are the privileges you spoke of just now. I let you have your say.—Yes, closed. Foreign affairs? Closed. My father would have been welcomed by the Empire at least. To-day they no longer want us. The Council of State? Closed. The government? Closed. Can you imagine a nobleman as a prefect? They were under Napoleon and the Restoration. The liberal professions? Closed. Though a noble had the genius of a Trosseau, a Berryer, or a Séguin, no one would have him to treat a cold in the head, to try a case about a division fence, or to build a foot-bridge. Commerce? Closed. Manufacturing? Closed, or practically so. To succeed in it we nobles must have a superior talent of which I, for my part, have never been conscious. Politics? That is like all the rest. People blame nobles for not taking up a profession! They forget that they are excluded from almost all, and the others are made ten times more difficult by their birth. And you would have me not call them pariahs! I say again, I resolved not to be one. The army was left. I prepared at Saint-Cyr, not without a struggle. There at least I knew the pleasure of not being a creature apart, of feeling that I was a Frenchman like the others, of not being exiled from my time, from my generation, from my fatherland; the delight of the uniform, of touching elbows with comrades, of obeying my superiors and of commanding my inferiors. That uniform no one shall tear from me except with my life. In losing it I should lose all my reasons for living.—All, no, since I love you. I wanted to speak to you to-day to learn whether I shall keep you in the trial that is in store for me. It will have its painful sides!—Now that you know what the crisis is that I am on the point of passing through," he added, "will you still answer no as you did a moment ago? I have no pride and I ask you again, will you be my wife? Not the wife of the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, whose father and whose environment you dread, but of a soldier with whom that environment will have no more to do, whom his father will have spurned? If I should ever have superintended the taking of a church inventory, it will arouse in the mothers another sort of indignation than for a mésalliance, as you call it, and as I do not call it. If I have you, the wound will bleed, doubtless, but I shall have you. You and my profession, my profession and you, those are enough to make me very strong."