MACMILLAN’S MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER, 1887
A VOLUME of fiction which, while it possesses something of the power and charm of Gustave Flaubert, takes us through no scenes of cruelty or coarseness, but relies for its interest on the blameless pathos of life, touched in the spirit of a true realism, is worth pointing out to English readers. The volume takes its name from the singular story of Serenus, a Christian martyr, to which are added certain briefer Stories Of The Past And Of To-day. With two slight exceptions, two pieces of peculiarly Parisian humour, which make a harsh contrast with the rest of the book, these stories are as pure and solemn as the pictures of Alphonse Legros. The narrative of Serenus, the patrician martyr, has about it something which reminds one of those sumptuous Roman basilicas put together out of the marble fragments of older Pagan temples or palaces; and in the shorter pieces the busy French journalist seems to have gone for a sort of mental holiday to quiet convent parlours and whitewashed village churches — places of subdued colour and personages congruous therewith, pleasant, doubtless, to fatigued Parisian eyes. M. Jules Lemaître is before all things an artist, showing in these pieces, the longest of which attains no more than sixty pages, that self-possession and sustained sense of design which anticipates the end in the commencement, and never loses sight of it — that gift of literary structure which lends so monumental an air to even the shortest of Flaubert’s pieces. Then, he has Flaubert’s sense of compassion and his peculiar interest in certain phases or aspects of religious life; and his art (again like Flaubert’s) is a learned art. There is the fruit of much and varied reading and thought in this volume, short as it is, though without a shade of pedantry; and its union of realism, of the force of style which is allied to a genuine realism, with an entire freedom from the dubious interests of almost all French fiction, gives it a charming freshness of effect.
We propose to say a few words on those shorter pieces first, giving some specimens of M. Lemaitre’s manner. The hero of La Mère Sainte-Agathe, a very intellectual young Parisian, has formed a somewhat artificial marriage engagement with a guileless orphan-girl at the convent school over which Mother Sainte-Agathe presides. Mother Sainte-Agathe was still young — thirty years, perhaps thirty-five. But years, in the case of “the religious,” when they are pretty and live really holy lives, rather embalm them than add to their age. When the young man visits the girl, the Mother presides over their interviews, looking at them with an air of kindness and serenity, with an expression she wore always, in which one seemed to detect the presence of a thought, unique, eternal in its character, ever mingled with the thought of the present hour. One day the girl leads her lover into the convent garden.
“It was a large one, and so neat and prim! — neat and prim as a convent-chapel. An avenue of limes, as exact in line as a row of tapers, led to a terrace projecting on the Loire, with a pleasing view over the landscape of Touraine. Between its gentle banks, amid scattered groups of rustling poplars, the river spread out like a lake, with little pale-coloured islands tufted with misty beds of osiers, and against the horizon a long, long bridge of delicate arches, silver-grey — all very sweet, with melting outlines in water-colour tints, under a lightsome sky of soft blue.”
But the childish lover is shrewd enough to notice that in these visits the real business of conversation (very superior conversation, on M. Renan, for instance) is wholly between the Mother and the clever young man. She writes one day at the end of one of her letters: “Mother Sainte-Agathe tells me that I don’t put warmth enough into my letters. Oh! my friend, I have enough of it in my heart nevertheless; only perhaps I am still too little to know how to tell it.” The young man does not marry the orphan, and, of course, not the reverend Mother. He thought it well to discontinue his visits to the convent “Almost without note of the fact, “he says, “I was treating Lydia like a child. Whenever I said anything at all serious it was to Mother Sainte-Agathe I addressed myself.
“They were exquisite, those conversations with the Mother — all the more exquisite because I was then finishing a volume of criticism and fantasy combined, in which I put the utmost amount of Renanism, Impressionism, and Parisian raillery, in turn or altogether. And it was often after the reading of some perverse book that I took myself to those white interviews. One day at parting, when I kissed Lydia, I saw tears in her eyes. ‘You are crying, Lydia: have I hurt you in any way?’ She gave me a long, serious look, and the look was no longer that of a mere child. ‘Are you quite sure,’ she said to me in a low voice, ‘that it is still for my sake that you come here?’
“It haunted me through the evening, through the whole night, little Lydia’s question. In spite of myself she had revealed to me what was at the bottom of my heart. In effect, I perceived with much distress that for some time past it was for Mother Sainte-Agathe I had come, that that charm of innocence in my betrothed was exhausted. Yes, it was over — well over!
“I did not venture to the convent next day, nor the day after that. Did she look out for me? I never returned there again.”
A still more melancholy note is struck in L’Ainée, the story of a beautiful girl, the eldest of eight sisters, who sees them all cheerfully married to the suitors who had begun by paying court to herself. It pained her to see her nephews and nieces, although she loved them much, and spent her days in work for them. And what added to her unhappiness was that every one, in these matters, took her for a confidante and adviser, regarding her as a person of extraordinary prudence, superior to human passions. To her the prize never comes. Her languors, her dejected resumptions of life, are told with great feeling and tact, till death comes just in time to save her from the dishonour to which the ennui of her days had at last tempted her.
Les Deux Saints presents a curious picture from religious life in a French country village, the not ill-natured irony of which by no means destroys an agreeable sense of calm remoteness from the world in reading it.
“The little village of Champignot-les-Raisins had an aged Curé, an old church, and in the church an ancient image. The image was the image of St. Vincent, patron of vine-dressers. It was of wood, and seemed to have been shaped by the strokes of a hatchet. It had a great belly, a big face frankly painted with vermillion, breathing of gaiety and goodnature — the physiognomy of a vine-dresser at the time of vintage. Pretty it was not. But the Curé and his flock were used to it. The image of the good saint enjoyed the greatest consideration in the parish, and deserved it, for it worked miracles.”
The old Curé dies. His youthful successor forces a smart new image on his flock. The parish is divided between the votaries of the old and the new; and the tiny provincial controversy seems by a certain touch of irony to give the true measure of many greater, perhaps less ingenuous controversies; and for half an hour one has a perfect calm at Champignot-les-Raisins.
M. Lemaître writes for the most part as a pure artist. He writes to please the literary sense: to call into pleasurable exercise a delicately-formed intelligence. In one instance, however, it is to be feared he is writing for a practical purpose. En Nourrice describes the fate of a little child put out to nurse in the country. “He is a beautiful infant,” cries the mother at his birth: “he shall be named George. I hope he may be very happy!” Alas! all goes the other way. His foster-brother, the strenuous Fred, wears out the frail stranger’s dainty frocks — la belle robe de Georges. — When the parents make their visits it is Fred who receives the mother’s embraces instead of the pining George, sent out of sight for the occasion. In short: for a few months and then die, having understood nothing in it all. One night he had refused to sleep. He had refused the feeding-bottle, and even the breast of Rosalie, the treat allowed him when it was too late. His eyes rolled convulsively: the cheeks were of the colour of earth: the infant was dying. Towards morning, instead of crying, little groanings had escaped him, almost like the complaints of a grown person. At last he had grown quite still and moved no more. His mother was glad to have escaped the sight of that.
“It rained in torrents when she and M. Loisil arrived at the village. The young mother, who had been in tears all the way from Paris, could weep no more, rocking herself in her damp gown, her red eyes under her crape. Early in the morning Rosalie had sent Fred to his grandmother’s. She, too, was weeping, — sincerely! if you please.
“Then the mother looked at the little corpse in its cradle of basket-work. George was wearing for the first time his fine frock, dirtied by Fred. He was terribly thin, with cheeks like old wax, the nose dwindled, the eyelids blue, his tiny mouth, pale and partly open, with a little foam at the back, had a touch of violet round the lips.
“‘Poor little babe! how he is changed!’ said the mother, sobbing. M. Loisil looked at the dead child attentively, but said nothing. A horrible doubt had come to him.
“‘Come,’ said Rosalie, ‘don’t look any more. It is too painful.’ Then on a sudden enters Totor, holding Fred in his arms, like a great bundle. Rosalie grew pale. Totor explained that grandmother was sick and would not keep them.
“And Fred, with one of George’s caps on his head and one of George’s sashes round his waist, in George’s white shoes, bursting with health, good-tempered, and moving skittishly in the arms of Totor, began smiling at the lady and gentleman, “The carpenter came, then the Curé, with a choirboy spattered with mud, carrying an old tarnished cross which tottered on its pole.
“They are sickening, those funerals of Parisian nurslings one sees sometimes crossing an empty village-street, leading, behind a coffin of the sise of a violin-case, a lady and gentleman in mourning, who pass by, dabbing their eyes, while the labourers regard them curiously from the barn-doors (it happened in La Beauce) on the way to leave a bit of their own hearts in some corner of a forgotten cemetery. As the first shovel of earth fell, Madame Loisil, who had forgotten in her illness that one first kiss she had given to George, cried out, ‘Oh! my poor babe, you will never have a kiss from me alive!’”
Of the Tales Of Other Days, two — Boun and Les Funérailles de Firdousi — are Oriental pieces, apologues, full of that mellow and tranquil wisdom which becomes the East. We profess to be no great lovers of an Oriental setting. A world from which mediæval and modern experience must, from the nature of the case, be excluded, makes on our minds an impression too vague for really artistic effect. The intimacies, the minute and concrete expression of the pathos of life, are apt to be wanting in compositions after the manner of Rasselas. But it is just that element — the refinement of wisdom, the refinement of justice, an exquisite compassion and mercy in the taking of life — which the reader may look for in the charming story of Boun.
Les Deux Fleurs is another Story Of Other Days, reminding us somewhat of Flaubert’s St. Julien l’Hospitalier. Its aim is, again, that of an apologue, impressing the characteristically French moral that, “in the regard of Heaven, charity is of equal value with chastity. It is best to have both if one can. Let him who lacks the second, try at all events to attain the first Amen!” As a picture from the Middle Ages it possesses a reality of impression not often found amid mediæval sceneries — an impression much enhanced by the gently satiric effect of the half-sceptical chaplain (a figure worthy of Chaucer), who accompanies the hero to the Crusades. Already in the Middle Ages, as he goes decorously on his way, he can divert himself in a curious observation of the ideas, the deportment of others.
“Simon Godard, mounted on his old mule, rode usually side by side with the knight-errant his master, whose candour of spirit he loved; and oftentimes they conversed together to while away the length of the journey. ( Shall we be soon in Palestine?’ Sir Oy de Hautecœur asked him one day, being no great clerk in matters of geography. ‘About a month hence we shall be getting near it, if no accident happens,’ answered the chaplain. ‘But only one-half of our number will be left when we arrive. In the East large numbers die of want, of fatigue, of malignant fevers. I don’t know whether you perceive it, lost in dreaming as you always are, but we leave behind us many of our companions; and as there is no time to dig their graves, the dogs and the crows provide them another sort of sepulture.’
“‘I don’t pity those,’ said the knight-errant, ‘who go before us to Paradise. The body is but a prison: its substance vile; and it matters little what becomes of it.’
“‘ Sire, there are moments when for my part I fail to distinguish clearly the prison from the prisoner. It grieves me that so many of us die. And I don’t see precisely what good end is served by their deaths. We are spending a year and more on the work of taking two or three towns, and when the day of conquest comes we shall be but a handful of men.’
“‘ True! But the walls of Jericho did not fall till the seventh day, and this is not yet the seventh crusade.’
“‘But is it really necessary that Christians should possess the sepulchre of the Lord, which, after all, is an empty sepulchre, and which He suffers to remain for a thousand years in the hands of infidels? And don’t you think that the soil of their country belongs to them, as lawfully as the soil of Fiance to Frenchmen?’
“‘ Talk not thus, Master Chaplain: such railleries ill become a Churchman and a holy man like yourself.’
“‘I am not Joking, sire! But the will of Heaven does not appear to me so manifestly as it appears to you. It irks me to think that Heaven has given to its worst enemies a wiser industry than ours, and better engines of war, and the victory over its faithful servants.’
“‘ Are you unaware then that their riches come from the devil and serve only to maintain them in their abominable manners? If Heaven permits them to overcome us from time to time, that is because it tries those whom it loves, because trials purify and lift us to itself.’
“‘ Sire! you would make an excellent theologian and I but an indifferent knight But if by good fortune I were a seigneur in the land of France, I think I should seldom leave it While the seigneurs go afar to get killed, the stay-at homes fall behind with their dues. The bourgeois in the towns add pound to pound, and as the seigneurs want money for their distant expeditions, get by purchase all sorts of liberties. I don’t complain of that, being of the people myself. But what I say is, that a nobleman who takes the Cross is greatly taken in.’
“‘I am aware, Master Chaplain, that you are not uttering your true thoughts, and that all this is meant to try me. I am not troubled because other Christians endeavour to improve their low and hard condition. For myself, I am neither a draper nor a grocer that I should remain always in my hole, taking no thought except for money and bodily gratification. I am in quest of what is of higher price. I am made of different paste from your bourgeois and your serfs. I should scarce be able to remain long in any one place, or limit my happiness to the things one can see and touch. I love the Demoiselle de Blanc-Lys, and I leave her not knowing whether I shall return. I go to make my trial in an adventure which you declare foolish and useless, and of which certainly I shall have no profit even if I succeed. And wherefore? — I know not. Only I can do no otherwise. And I have a sense that it is pleasing to God and that I am a workman of His.’
“Master Simon Godard could only answer, ‘Amen!’”
On the whole, Pauvre Ame is the most characteristic of M. Lemaitre’s shorter stories. We think the English reader will forgive some copious extracts.
“If one must needs feel pity for all people’s sorrows, the life and heart of an honest man would not suffice. One would begin by lamenting the violent and tragic griefs which force themselves into view. And then those other sorrows, the sorrows which are modest, which hide themselves under a veil of sweetness and seeming serenity. There are destinies stifled and silent, where the pain is so secret and so equable in its continuance, and makes so little sound, that no one thinks of commiseration. Yet nothing is more worthy of pity than those unquiet and solitary hearts, which have yearned to give themselves and no one has cared to take, which have lavished their treasures unheeded and without fruit, and which death at last carries away, outwardly intact, but torn within, because they preyed upon themselves.”
Mademoiselle de Mérisols, then, one of those quiet souls whose fortunes M. Lemaître loves to trace, inhabited in an old street of convents a small set of apartments, with melancholy old furniture she had been able to keep from what had belonged to her parents. The happiest hours of her life were at the Sunday mass and vespers. She would have been pretty could she have felt gay. She loves and is disappointed; but she bravely resumes once more her life of hard work as a teacher, putting her from time to time in contact with home scenes which only bring the closer to herself her sense of isolation in the world. Love comes at last, but in that ironic mood which seems to be one of M. Lemaître’s fixed ideas of the spirit of human life. She was thirty-five. The excellent M. de Maucroix was twenty years older. But she felt afraid of eternal solitude. She had hopes of a child, but it never came. For eight years she was her husband’s nurse. She closed his eyes and shed tears for him. She found herself rich. Only once again the poor soul was alone in the world. She busied herself in good works, but felt an immense weariness. What she needed was some one she might love singly and with all her force. Then follows one of those curious episodes only possible in Roman Catholic France, and the writer finds his opportunity for a striking clerical portrait.
“Madame de Maucroix was in the habit of attending the Sunday Offices at the chapel of the Dominicans. It was wanner, sweeter, more intimate, than in the churches. Many women of fashion repaired thither, rustling softly as in a drawing-room.
“One great festival a monk preached — thirty years of age, handsome, slender, with a superb pallor. He talked much of love and human affections. He quoted Plato, Virgil, Lamartine. He preached on doubt, and was still more modern. He quoted contemporaries — Jouffroy, Leopardi, Heine, De Musset. He described the anguish of a mind which does not believe; and some of his touches would have been equally appropriate to the picture of a heart in anguish because it does not love. Father Montarcy was one of those generous hearts with a superficial mind often to be found in the order of St. Dominic. He had all the beautiful illusions of Lacordaire, and united to them some pretensions to science. He was one of those monks who have read Darwin and attend the physiological courses at the Sorbonne. His style of speaking was vague and inflated, but with flights of real beauty. He moved along, involved in his dream, isolated from what is real, body and soul alike draped in white — draped with much skill He was profoundly chaste, but felt his power over women, taking pleasure in it in spite of himself, lending himself to their adoration.
“He became the director of Madame de Maucroix. She told him the story of her life and confided to him the void in her heart. What was she to do to fill that void? And every time she called him Father bethought herself that he might have been her son.
“With a fine stroke of policy, moved also by the poor woman’s desolation, and responding to his own secret desire, he observed gravely: ‘My daughter, it is I who should call you mother, and you should call me son. I am young, and I feel how feeble I should be without that special aid which Heaven accords to its priests. I may believe that you have acquired by a life of virtue an illumination equal to that conferred by the holy oil of the priesthood. Will you be my mother and director?’ And he, in his turn, confessed himself to Madame de Maucroix.”
She had a son, then! Her life became a charming one. Every morning she assisted at his mass. She busied herself, precisely as a mother might have done, with his wardrobe and his linen. She accompanied him to the various towns to which he went to preach, and listened with delight to all his sermons. She seeks to know the family history of Father Montarcy, and hearing that he was an orphan feels her joy renewed. He was the son of a working-man, like the Saviour, like many who have become powerful in this world. She does but admire him the more. He had but one sister, devout, insignificant enough, a dressmaker in a country town. Madame de Maucroix provided a dowry and got her well married. She feels proud to have a hand in all the affairs of the convent, in going thither with perfect freedom, receiving from the fathers as she passes ceremonious smiles and greetings, as if in recognition of her right. Often she would call to mind the great Christian women of the early Church, Paula, Monica. It was fascinating to play the part of a Mother of the Church. What Madame Swetchine had been for Lacordaire, it was her dream to be for Father Montarcy.
Only she carried the part of director a little too far. A kind of jealousy — jealousy of penitents younger, and with other charms than hers — mingles with her devotion.
“‘Pardon my freedom,’ she says one day, ‘but it is dangerous for a man of your age to listen for hours to the confessions of young women made after the manner of the one who has just left you.’
“It was like a blow in the face. The young monk raised himself in all the pride of his priesthood, pride of a man chaste and sure of himself, with the rudeness of a monk contemptuous of women. — The chapel was empty. He darted out of the confessional, and with a terrible voice, a magnificent tragic movement of his great sleeves, exclaimed: ‘Madame de Maucroix! Understand! I forbid you to intrude into my life as a priest and interfere in matters which concern Heaven and myself alone.’ And he quitted the chapel with majestic step.
“Madame de Maucroix sank upon the pavement. Next day, broken down with grief and quite prepared to humiliate herself, she returned to the convent. The porter informed her that Father Montarcy was absent. The Prior, whom she asked to see, announced in freezing tones that he was departed for the Tyrol, where he purposed to spend some months in a convent recently founded. She understood that all was over. She possessed in Sologne a little old country-house, and thither she took refuge. There she lived for a year amid the melancholy of the pinewoods, of the violet heaths and motionless meres stained with blood at sunset, passing her days in the practice of a minute and mechanical devotion, sleepily plucking the beads of her rosary, chilled, without thoughts, with tearless eyes. In truth, she was dying day by day of an affection of the liver, aggravated suddenly by her recent emotions. When she saw that her end was near, she begged the sister who nursed her to write to Father Montarcy that she was going to die. Actually she died next day, and the Father’s answer came too late. It was wanting in simplicity, though perhaps not in sincerity: ‘My mother! my mother! all is forgotten. Ah! often have I wept in the presence of Heaven,’ &c., &c. It was signed, ‘Your son.’
“The good sister, who received the letter, thought she might open it, and felt somewhat surprised and scandalised.”
The peculiar sense of irony which is the closing effect of every one of these shorter pieces is also the prevailing note of Serenus — that more lengthy and weighty narrative, which gives name to the whole volume. It embodies the imaginary confession of a supposed Christian martyr, who was not in reality a Christian at all, who had in truth died by his own hand.
At daybreak, on a morning of March, A. D. 90, a group of Christians has come to the Mamertine prison to receive the bodies of certain criminals condemned to death.
“It was cold: small rain was falling: towards the east the sky was tinged with an impure and ghastly yellow. The Eternal City, emerging from the shadows of night, unrolled around the Capitol its grey billows of houses, like a dirty sea after a storm. Certain ponderous monuments rose above the rest here and there. Their wet roofs shone feebly in the dawn.”
“Let us pray for our brothers!” says an aged priest in the company; and at that moment the magistrates entrusted with the execution of capital sentences emerge from the prison. The Christians enter. The head and trunk of the grey-haired consular, Flavius Clemens, are lying there. A patch of blood glistens on the ground beside him. One of the Christians dips in it the corner of a white linen cloth, which he folds carefully and hides within his tunic. In the next cell lay the corpse of a man still young. He seemed to have died a natural death. Even in death his fine but enigmatic features wore an air of irony and pride. “The body of Marcus Annæus Serenus!” cries the gaoler. “He was found dead this morning. The triumvirs thought it not worth while to decapitate a dead body. It is thought he died of poison.” The rude face of the aged priest contracted suddenly with a look of surprise, of pain and indignation.
Through the midst of the contemptuous bystanders the bodies are reverently borne away along the Appian Way, well described by M. Lemaître, to a vast subterranean chamber, the tomb of Flavius Clemens, where the priest Timotheus remains alone for a time with the sacred remains. As he gazes on the face of Serenus with a look “keen and persistent, as if he would have fathomed to its depths the mysterious soul which dwelt no longer in that elegant form,” his hand rests for a moment on the bosom of the corpse. He feels something below the silken tunic — a roll of parchment. He recognises the handwriting of Serenus. But the characters are small and fine, impossible to read in that feeble light. Hardly pausing to cover the pale face, he hastens from the sepulchre, and returns with the manuscript to his sordid lodging in Rome. Here he draws forth and reads with eagerness the confessions of Serenus.
“It is folly perhaps to undertake this confession. Either it will not be read, or it will distress those who read it. Still, it may be, that in recounting my story to myself for the last time, I shall justify myself in my own eyes. Some worthy souls have loved me, but none have really known me. Now, though for a long time past it has been my pride to live in myself, to be impenetrable to every one beside, my secret weighs upon me to-day. A certain regret comes to me ( it is almost remorse ) that I have played so successfully the singular part which circumstances and my own curiosity have imposed upon me; and I should wish, by way of persuading myself that I could not have acted otherwise, to take up the entire chain of my thoughts and actions from my earliest days to the day on which I am to die.”
It is a charming figure, certainly, which Serenus displays, rich with intellectual endowments, and a heart that, amid all the opportunities for corruption which could beset a fortunate patrician in the days of Domitian, never loses its purity to the last — affectionate, reflective, impressible by pity, with “the gift of tears.” And here is one of his earliest experiences.
“I was twelve years old when the great fire destroyed one-half of Rome and threw more than a hundred thousand people on the pavements. During two or three years, in spite of the enormous distributions of money and bread ordered by the emperor, the misery in Rome was fearful. The spectacle of so much undeserved suffering wounded my heart incurably. I conceived a lively notion of the injustice of things and the absurdity of men’s destinies. I found it unjust that my father should be the possessor of five hundred slaves while so many poor people were dying of hunger. I gave away all the money I could dispose of. But, with the stiff logic of my age, I considered that no thanks were due to me, and avoided people’s effusive thanks, the coarseness of which shocked the fine taste of my aristocratic youth. One day my tutor took me to a grand festival which Nero gave to the people in his gardens. To divert the anger of the populace, which accused him of being the author of the conflagration, he had caused some hundreds of Christians to be arrested. The majority of them had been thrown to the beasts in the circus: others, arrayed in sacks steeped in resin, were attached to tall stakes at intervals along the broad pathways. At nightfall fire was applied to them. The crowds pressed with load vociferations around the living torches. The flame which enveloped the culprits, hollowed by the wind from time to time, allowed the horrible faces to be seen, with great open mouths, though one could not hear the cries. A stench of burnt flesh filled the air. I had a nervous attack and was carried home half dead. The shock had been too great; and although at that age the most painful impressions are quickly effaced, something of it remained with me — a languor of spirits at certain moments, a melancholy, an indolence of pulse, rare in a child.”
This was on one side: on the other were the varied intellectual interests offered to a reflective mind in that curious, highly educated, wistful age. In a few effective but sparing traits Serenus depicts his intellectual course, through the noble dreams of a chaste Stoicism, through the exquisite material voluptuousness of Epicureanism when the natural reaction had come, until, having exhausted experience, as he fancies, he proposes to die.
It was an age in which people had carried the art of enjoyment to its height.
“Never before, I think, has the world seen, never again will it see, so small a number of persons absorb and occupy for their own uses so large a number of human lives. Some of my friends had as many as three thousand slaves, and hardly knew the real extent of their riches. And the science of pleasure was on a level with the resources at its disposition. Many successive generations of a privileged class had made a study of the means of refining, varying, multiplying, agreeable sensations. Posterity, assuredly, will hardly conceive the kind of life which some of us have known and practised. But as the future will not easily imagine the intensity of our physical pleasures, perhaps it will even less understand the depth of our satiety. It will be surprised, in reading our chronicles, at the number of those who in this age have committed suicide. After fifteen yean of a revel, refined and coarse by turns, my body exhausted, my senses dulled, my heart void to the bottom of all belief, and even of illusion, what was I to do in the world? It figured to me as a ridiculous spectacle, and interested me no longer. I had retained that native sweetness of temper which came to me from my father, but only because I found it pleasant to be kind; and even that too was come to be indifferent to me. For the rest, public employments had become sordid things of purchase, and I loathed every form of activity. I languished in an immense, an incurable ennui, and having no further motive to live, I wished to die. Death had no fears for me. It was the great deliverer. Only, I desired to die without suffering.”
The would-be suicide is saved from death by the intervention, at the last moment, of his sister, the youthful Serena, in the retired life of a young orphan girl scarcely known by him hitherto; and her subsequent devotion during the long illness which follows touches him deeply. In reality her devotion is due in part to a motive higher than natural sisterly devotion. On the part of Serenus also, there was something deeper than merely fraternal affection.
“It was love of a peculiar kind, such as I had never before experienced in the faintest degree. Serena was so different from all the women I had ever known. It seemed to me that that love evoked from the depths of my past life and brought to new birth within me what had been lost in my earlier days, those ardours of the youthful sage aspiring towards an absolute purity. Then, in proportion as I recovered my mental vigour, my old curiosity returned; and little by little I introduced into this ardent affection for my sister, the attentive mood of an observer, attracted by the spectacle of an extraordinary soul.
“One day Serena said to me, ‘Will you give me a great pleasure? Come with me to-morrow morning where I shall take you.’
“‘ I will go where you will, Serena.’”
Serena takes him to see the ceremonies of the Eucharist in a Christian oratory.
“I perceived among the company assembled the consul of that year, Flavius Clemens — a circumstance which explained the fact that this meeting took place in one of the burial places of his family. I recognised the wife of Clemens and his niece, and Paulina, the widow of Seneca, pale for ever from having followed her husband more than half way on the road to death.
They were deeply veiled. At last I saw in the front rank Acte, the former mistress of Nero, the former friend of my father, still beautiful in spite of her fifty years, but with a little of the cosmetic art, methinks. The rest of the company appeared to be composed of poor people and slaves.”
To Serenus the company, the office for which it was assembled, seemed grave, majestic, touching, and something altogether new. But he perceives also, clearly enough, once for all, that for him these rites will never be more than a spectacle, that there is a gulf between these people and himself.
“‘ My dear Serenus,’ said my sister, as we departed, ‘You have now seen what the Christians are. You will love them more and more in proportion as you come to know them. You are unhappy, as I well know. You must become a Christian. The Truth is there. There, also, is the secret of consolation.’
“‘I will think of it, Serena.’”
In fact, he takes pains to inform himself on the matter, interested at finding many a familiar thought of ancient Pagan wisdom in a new setting. Yes! —
“All the virtues which the Pagan philosophers had already known and preached seemed to me among the disciples of Christ to have been transformed by a sentiment absolutely new — a love of a God who was man, a God crucified — alove burning, full of sensibility, of tears, of confidence, of hope. Clearly, neither the personification of the forces of nature, nor the abstract deity of the Stoics, had ever inspired anything like this. And this love of God, the origin of, and first step towards, all other Christian virtues, communicated to them a purity and sweetness, an unction, and, as it were, a perfume, such as I had never breathed before.”
Yet with all his heartfelt admiration for believers, Serenus is still unable to believe. Like a creature of the nineteenth century, he finds the world absolutely subject to the reign of physical law. And then there were difficulties of another sort, of which he became sensible now and again.
“The idea which my new brethren entertained of the world about us, and of our life here, Jarred upon I know not what sentiment of nature within me. In spite of my own persistent pessimism, I was displeased that men should so despise the only mode of life, after all, of which we are certain. I found them, moreover, far too simple-minded, closed against all artistic impressions, limited, inelegant Or, perhaps, a certain anxiety awaking in me, I feared for the mischief which might be caused to the empire by a conception of life such as that, if it continued to spread — a detachment such as theirs from all civil duties, all profane occupations. Sometimes I was decidedly unjust to them. The religious after-thought which the Christians mingled with their affections, by way of purifying them, seemed to me to chill those affections, in depriving them of their natural liberty, their grace, their spontaneity. To be loved only as redeemed by Christ, and in regard of my eternal salvation, made my heart cold. And then it shocked me that these saintly people should feel so sure of so many things, and things so wonderful, while I, for my part, had searched so carefully without finding, had doubted so much in my life, and finally made a pride of my unbelief.”
But, inconsistently enough, he is offended at times by the survival of many a human weakness among the believers. The consul Clemens, among those brothers who were all equal before Heaven, was treated with marked consideration, and welcomed it Slaves were still slaves. The women were rivals for the special attention of the priests. Acte, once the mistress of Nero, somewhat exaggerated her piety, and still retained also many of her former artificial manners.
“In spite of those little weaknesses, what good, what beautiful souls, I came across there! In vain I said to myself, these holy persons are making a bargain; they reckon on Paradise; it is in view of a reward that they practise the most sublime virtues. But to believe at all in that distant far-off recompense, is not this too itself an act of virtue, since it involves belief in the justice of God, and a conception of Him, as being that which He ought to be?”
And noting sometimes the ardent quality of their faith and its appropriateness to human needs, the needs especially of the poor and suffering, Serenus could not but feel that the future would be with them. If the empire failed, the religion of Christ would flourish on its ruins. Then, what sort of a thing would that new humanity be? More virtuous, doubtless, and therefore happier, since happiness comes of the soul; on the other hand, he thinks ( mistakenly, as we know, looking backwards on the length and breadth of Christian history ) with less art, and less elegance of soul, a feebler understanding of the beautiful.
Presently, a certain change takes place in the life of the Christian community. The influence of Calixtus, a priest of the sweeter and more lenient type, is superseded by that of Timotheus, lately returned to Rome — a man sincerely good, but narrow-minded and rigorous in his zeal. He would have Serenus receive baptism, or depart entirely from the church. It takes Serenus some time to explain away his scruples regarding what seems at first sight an act of hypocrisy. And then the trial comes. Partly on the ground of their religious belief, mainly for an affront to the Emperor, the chief members of the community are arrested. Serenus has said adieu to his sister. He is in prison, awaiting his end.
“My gaoler is a good-natured fellow. I had about me the means of writing, and he has procured me a lamp. He informs me that the executioner will come about the hour of daybreak. I have been writing all the night. My last link to life is broken; and death, be it annihilation, be it the passage to a world unknown, has no terrors for me. I have replaced myself almost exactly in the state of mind in which I was last year, when I determined to die in my bath. But at this last moment a dread has come upon me for a death which soils and disfigures: I fear the stroke of the axe, which may fail in its aim. In my time the science of poisons has reached a high perfection, and the hollow pearl in my ring contains a colourless drop of liquid which will destroy me in a few minutes, almost without pain. I have seen the honours Christians pay to the burial-place wherein rest the remains of the victims of Nero. They will honour me also as one of their saints. Can I, at this late hour, undeceive them? But for what purpose? I am willing they should guess the fact of my suicide, that they should read my confession; yet I will do nothing to that end; for if Serena knew how I died, in what condition of unbelief, her grief would be too great for her. For the rest, I have good hope that Timotheus, who has no love for me, will allow only a limited form of reverence to be paid to my bones; and if some simple hearts revere me more than I deserve, again what does it matter? It is their faith will be reckoned to them, not the merits of the saint they will invoke. And then, after all, it is not a bad man whose memory they will honour. I have sincerely sought for truth. I forced myself in youth to attain to sanctity as I conceived it. And if I have been indolent, weak, voluptuous — if I have done little for other people — at least I have always had great indulgence for them, a great pity.”
The austere Timotheus, full of suspicion, pored for hours over the manuscript, which was clear enough at the beginning. But the scholarly Latin of the young patrician was not always intelligible to him, towards the end the handwriting became confused, and he remained still in doubt regarding the precise character of the death of Serenus. He might have confided the confession to a more expert reader; but, though profoundly curious on the matter, he feared a possible scandal. More than suspicious, he would fain allow Serenus the benefit of such doubt as remained. If he had not died for Christ, at least he had been condemned because of Him; and, perhaps, even at the last moment, some sudden illumination, some gleam of faith had come to him. For a moment he thought of burning the manuscript; but a certain sense of respect for the dead restrained him. He replaced the manuscript in a fold of the tunic: “Let his sin, or his innocence, remain with him. God! who judgest the heart, I recommend my brother to your goodness!”
It is about eight hundred years later that we find Serenus again — Marcus Annæus Serenus, by the designation of his tombstone in the catacombs, — as Saint Marc le Romain, at Beaugency-sur-Loire, whither his precious relics have been brought from Rome by the Abbot Angelran. Among those relics the Abbot had discovered the manuscript, and confided it, still intact, to the most learned member of the Benedictine community over which he presided. With him those old doubts of Timotheus became certainty. With much labour he deciphers the writing, and discovers that the supposed martyr had died a Pagan.
But Saint Marc the Roman had already become popular, and worked miracles. The learned monk was unwilling to trouble the minds of the faithful, to gratify, moreover, the monks of a rival house. Still, he lacked the courage to destroy a document so singular, and hid the manuscript in a corner of the monastic library. It passed we are told, in 1793, into the public library of Beaugency, where it was found and read by our author. The reputation of Saint Marc the Roman maintained itself till far onwards in the Middle Ages. His miracles, like himself of old, were always considerate, always full of “indulgence.” The same sort of irony, then, makes itself felt, as the final impression of the history of Serenus — the same sort of irony as that which shaped the fortunes of M. Lemaitre’s other characters — the worthiest of all the sisters, who fails to get married: the mother who embraces the wrong infant: Boun, with her gift of the fairy’s ring, whose last, best miracle of assistance is but to restore her again to the simplicity of mind and body in which it had found her. “She has this irony — Dame Nature!” — and in the recognition of it, supplemented by a keen sense of what should be the complementary disposition on man’s part, is the nearest approach which our author makes to a philosophy of life. Nature, circumstance, is far from pitiful, abounds in mockeries, in baffling surprises and misadventures, like a cynical person amused with the distresses of children. Over against that cynical humour, it may be our part to promote in life the mood of the kindly person, still regarding people very much as children, but, like Serenus, with “a great pity for them, a great indulgence.”
M. Lemaitre has many and varied interests, a marked individuality of his own amid them all, and great literary accomplishments. His success in the present volume might well encourage him to undertake a work of larger scope, — to add to his other excellent gifts, in the prolonged treatment of some one of those many interests, that great literary gift of patience.