London, April to September 1822
ABOUT four leagues from Beccles, in a small village called Bungay, there lived an English clergyman, the reverend Mr. Ives, a great Hellenist and mathematician. He had a still young wife, charming in her person, her mind, and her manner, and an only daughter, who was fifteen.[16] Having been introduced into this household, I was more warmly welcomed there than anywhere else. We drank together in the old English fashion, Mr. Ives and I, staying at table for two hours after the women had withdrawn. This man, who had seen America, loved telling tales of his travels, hearing the story of mine, and talking about Newton and Homer. His daughter, who had studied hard to please him, was an excellent musician, and she sang as well as Madame Pasta sings today.[17] She would reappear at teatime and charm away the old parson’s infectious drowsiness. Leaning on the end of the piano, I would listen to Miss Ives in silence.
When the music was over, the young lady questioned me about France and literature; she asked me to draw up courses of study. She especially wanted to acquaint herself with the Italian authors, and begged me to give her some notes on the Divina Commedia and the Gerusalemme. Little by little, I began to feel the timid charm of an affection that springs from the soul. I had bedecked the Floridians with flowers, but I would not have dared to pick up Miss Ives’s glove. I felt embarrassed when I tried to translate a few passages of Tasso: I was more at ease when I turned my hand to Dante, a genius more masculine and chaste.
Charlotte Ives’s age and mine were in concord. Something melancholy enters into relationships not formed until the middle of our lives. If two people do not meet in the prime of youth, the memories of the beloved are not mixed in the portion of days when we breathed without knowing her, and these days, which belong to other companions, are painful to recall and, as it were, severed from our present existence. Is there a disproportion of age? Then the drawbacks increase. The older one began his life before the younger one was born, and the younger one, in turn, is destined to live on alone; the one walked in solitude on the far side of the cradle, and the other shall walk in solitude on the near side of the grave. The past was a desert for the first, and the future shall be a desert for the second. It is difficult to love with all the conditions of happiness, youth, beauty, and opportunity, and with a harmony of heart, taste, character, graces, and years.
Having taken a fall from my horse, I stayed some time in Mr. Ives’s house. It was winter, and the dreams of my life began to flee in the face of reality. Miss Ives became more reserved. She stopped bringing me flowers, and she no longer wanted to sing.
If someone had told me that I would spend the rest of my life in obscurity at the hearth of this isolated family, I would have died of joy. Love needs nothing but continuance to be at once Eden before the Fall and a Hosanna without end. Make beauty stay, youth last, and the heart never grow weary, and you shall re-create heaven on earth. Love is so much the supreme happiness, it is haunted always by the illusion of infinitude. It wishes to make only irrevocable promises. In the absence of its joys, it attempts to eternalize its sorrows. A fallen angel, it still speaks the language it spoke in the incorruptible abode, and its hope is never to die. In its double nature and its double illusion here below, it aspires to perpetuate itself by immortal thoughts and unending generations.
I foresaw with some dismay the moment when I would be obliged to leave. On the eve of my departure, dinner was a gloomy affair. To my great surprise, Mr. Ives withdrew after dessert, taking his daughter with him, and I remained alone with Mrs. Ives. She was extremely embarrassed. I suspected she was going to reproach me for an inclination that she must have long since guessed, but of which I had never spoken a word. She looked at me, lowered her eyes, and blushed. She herself was, in her discomfort, quite seductive: there was no feeling she could have failed to inspire in me. At long last, making an effort to overcome the obstacle that prevented her from speech, she said to me, in English: “Sir, you have seen my confusion: I do not know if Charlotte pleases you, but it is impossible to deceive a mother. My daughter has certainly become attached to you. Mr. Ives and I have discussed the matter. You suit us in every respect and we believe you would make our daughter happy. You no longer have a native country, you have just lost your family, and your property has been sold. What could possibly take you back to France? Until you inherit from us, you can live with us, here.”
Of all the painful things that I had endured, this was the greatest and most wounding. I threw myself on my knees at Mrs. Ives’s feet and covered her hands with kisses and tears. She thought I was weeping with happiness and started sobbing with joy. She stretched out her arm to pull the bell-rope and called out to her husband and her daughter.
“Stop!” I cried. “I am married!”
Mrs. Ives fell back in a faint.
I left and set out on foot without returning to my room. When I reached Beccles, I caught the mail coach for London, after having written a letter to Mrs. Ives. I regret I did not keep a copy.
I have retained the sweetest, most tender, and most grateful recollection of these events. Before my name was known far and wide, Mr. Ives’s family were the only people to take an interest in me and the only ones to welcome me with sincere affection. When I was poor, unknown, outcast, without beauty or allure, they offered me a definite future, a country, an enchanting wife to draw me out of my shell, a mother almost equal to her daughter in beauty to take the place of my own aged mother, and a well-educated father who loved and cultivated literature to replace the father whom Heaven had taken from me. What did I have to offer in recompense for all that? No illusions could have entered into their choice of me; I had a right to believe myself loved. Since that time, I have met with only one attachment lofty enough to inspire me with the same confidence.[18] As for the interest which was shown in me later, I have never been able to sort out whether external causes—the fracas of fame and the prestige of parties, the glamour of high literary and political status—were not a cloak that drew such eagerness around me.
I see now that, had I married Charlotte Ives, my role on earth would have changed. Buried in a county of Great Britain, I would have become a gentleman chasseur and not a single line would have issued from my pen. I might even have forgotten my language, for I could write in English and even the thoughts in my head were beginning to take form in English. Would my country have lost so much by my disappearance? If I could set aside what has consoled me, I would say that I might already have counted up many days of calm, instead of the many troubled days fallen to my lot. What would the Empire, the Restoration, and all the other divisions and quarrels of France have meant to me? I wouldn’t have had to palliate failings and combat errors every morning of my life. Is it even certain that I have real talent: a talent worth all the sacrifices of my life? Will I survive my tomb? And if I do live beyond the grave, given the transformations that are even now taking place, in a world changed and occupied by entirely different things, will there be a public there to hear me? Will I not be a man of another time, unintelligible to the new generations? Will my ideas, my feelings, my very style not seem boring and old-fashioned to a sneering posterity? Will my shade be able to say, as Virgil’s did to Dante: Poeta fui e cantai? “I was a poet and I sang.”[19]