Vallée-aux-Loups, November 1817
BACK FROM Montboissier, here are the last lines I shall write in my hermitage. I have to abandon it all, even the handsome saplings in their close-set rows, which were already beginning to hide and crown their father. I will no longer see the magnolia that promised its flower to the grave of my Floridian girl, the Jerusalem pine, the Lebanese cedar dedicated to the memory of Saint Jerome, the laurel from Grenada, the plane tree from Greece, the Armorican oak at the foot of which I depicted Bianca, sang of Cymodocée, invented Velléda. These trees were born and grew up together with my dreams: they were their Hamadryads. Now they are about to pass under another’s sway. Will their new master love them as I have loved them? He will let them rot, maybe he will cut them down: I can keep nothing on this earth. In saying goodbye to the woods of Aulnay, I shall recall the goodbye I said to the woods of Combourg. All my days are goodbyes.
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The taste for poetry that Lucile had inspired in me was like oil thrown on a fire. My feelings gathered a new measure of force, and vain ideas of fame passed through my mind. For the moment I believed in my talent, but soon, recovering a proper distrust of myself, I began to doubt that talent, as I doubt it still. I regarded my work as a wicked temptation, and I felt vexed with Lucile for having engendered such an unhappy inclination in me. I stopped writing, and I took to mourning my future glory as one might mourn for a glory that has passed.
Returned to my former idleness, I felt all the more sharply what my youth was missing. I was a mystery to myself. I could not so much as look at a woman without being troubled; I would blush if she spoke a word to me. My timidity, which was already excessive with everyone, was so great in the presence of a woman that I would have preferred any torment whatsoever to being left alone with her; yet no sooner did she leave the room than I wished she would return. The descriptions written by Virgil, Tibullus, and Massillon loomed in my memory; but the image of my mother and sister, covering everything with its purity, thickened the veils that nature was contriving to lift. My life as an affectionate brother and son obscured the possibility of any less disinterested affection. If the loveliest slave of a seraglio had been handed over to me, I swear I would not have known what to ask of her. Chance enlightened me.
A neighbor of ours in Combourg had come to spend a few days at the castle with his wife, who was very pretty. I don’t remember what occurred in the village, but everyone ran to one of the windows of the great hall to see. I got there first, with the beautiful stranger close behind me. I wanted to yield my place to her and turned toward her. Inadvertently she blocked my path, and I felt myself pressed between her and the window. I no longer knew what was happening around me.
At that moment, I suspected that to love and be loved in a manner as yet unknown to me must be the supreme happiness. If I had done what other men do, I would soon have learned the pains and pleasures of passion, the seed of which I carried within me. But everything in my life took an unusual turn. The ardor of my thoughts, my timidity, and my solitude, instead of spurring me to action, threw me back upon myself. For lack of a real object of affection, I was prompted by the power of my vague desires to evoke a phantom that would never leave me. I do not know if the history of the human heart offers another example of this kind.