Life Returns.
IN THE MEANTIME, while Rousseau believed his invalid to be on the high road to health, and while Therese informed all her neighbors that, thanks to the prescriptions of the learned doctor, M. de Jussieu. Gilbert was entirely out of danger, during this period of general confidence the young man incurred the worst danger he had yet run, by his obstinacy and his perpetual reveries. Rousseau could not be so confident, but that he entertained in his inmost thoughts a distrust solidly founded on philosophical reasonings.
Knowing Gilbert to be in love, and having caught him in open rebellion to medical authority, he judged that he would again commit the same faults if he gave him too much liberty. Therefore, like a good father, he had closed the padlock of Gilbert’s attic more carefully than ever, tacitly permitting him meanwhile to go to the window, but carefully preventing his crossing the threshold. It may easily be imagined what rage this solicitude, which changed his garret into a prison, aroused in Gilbert’s breast, and what hosts of projects crowded his teeming brain. To many minds constraint is fruitful in inventions. Gilbert now thought only of Andree, of the happiness of seeing and watching over the progress of her convalescence, even from afar; but Andree did not appear at the windows of the pavilion, and Gilbert, when he fixed his ardent and searching looks on the opposite apartments, or surveyed every nook and corner of the building, could only see Nicole carrying the invalid’s draught on a porcelain plate, or M. de Taverney surveying the garden, and vigorously taking snuff, as if to clear and refresh his intellect. Still these details tranquilized him, for they betokened illness, but not death.
“There,” thought he, “beyond that door, behind that blind, breathes, sighs, and suffers, she whom I adore, whom I idolize — she whose very sight would cause the perspiration to stand upon my forehead and make my limbs tremble — she to whose existence mine is forever riveted — she for whom I alone breathe and live!;”
And then, leaning forward out of his window — so that the inquisitive C’hon thought, twenty times in an hour, that he would throw himself out — Gilbert, with his practiced eye, look the measure of the partitions, of the floors, of the depth of the pavilion, and constructed an exact plan of them in his brain. There M. de Taverney slept; there must be the kitchen; there Philip’s apartments; there the cabinet occupied by Nicole; and, last of all, there must be Andree’s chamber — the sanctuary at the door of which he would have given his life to remain for one day kneeling.
This sanctuary, according to Gilbert’s plan, was a large apartment on the ground floor, guarded by an antechamber, from which opened a small cabinet with a glass door, which, agreeably to Gilbert’s arrangement, served as Nicole’s sleeping chamber.
“Oh’!” exclaimed the excited youth in his fits of jealous fury, “how happy are the beings who are privileged to walk in the garden on which my window and those of the staircase look. How happy those thoughtless mortals who tread the gravel of the parterre! For there, during the silence of night, may be heard Mademoiselle Andree’s plaints and sighs.”
Between the formation of a wish and its accomplishment there is a wide gulf; but fertile imaginations can throw a bridge across. They can find the real in the impossible; they know how to cross the broadest rivers and scale the highest mountains, by a plan peculiarly their own.
For the first few days Gilbert contented himself with wishing. Then he reflected that these much envied, happy beings were simple mortals, endowed, as he was, with limbs to tread the soil of the garden, and with arms to open the doors. Then, by degrees, he pictured to himself the happiness there would be in secretly gliding into this forbidden house — in pressing his ears against the Venetian blinds, through which the sounds from the interior were, as it were, filtered. With Gilbert, wishing did not long suffice; the fulfillment must be immediate.
Besides, his strength returned rapidly; youth is fruitful and rich. At the end of three days, his veins still throbbing with feverish excitement, Gilbert felt himself as strong as he had ever been in his life.
He calculated that, as Rousseau had locked him in, one of the greatest difficulties — that of obtaining an entrance into the hotel of the Taverneys by the street door — was placed out of the question; for, as the entrance-door opened upon the Rue Coq-Heron, and as Gilbert was locked up in the Rue Plastriere, he could not of course reach any street, and had therefore no need to open any doors. There remained the windows. That of his garret looked down upon a perpendicular wall of forty-eight feet in depth.
No one, unless he were drunk or mad, would venture to descend it. “Oh! those doors are happy inventions after all,” thought he, clenching his hands, “and yet Monsieur Rousseau, a philosopher, locks them!”
To break the padlock! That would be easily done; but if so, adieu to the hospitable roof which had sheltered him.
To escape from Luciennes, from the Rue Plastriere, from Taverney — always to escape, would be to render himself unable to look a single creature in the face without fearing to meet the reproach of ingratitude.
“No!” thought he, “Monsieur Rousseau shall know nothing of it.”
Leaning out of his window. Gilbert continued:
“With my hands and my legs, those instruments granted to free men by nature, I will creep along the tiles, and, keeping in the spout — which is narrow indeed, but straight, and therefore the direct road from one end to the other — I shall arrive, if I get on so far, at the skylight parallel to this. Now, this skylight belongs to the stairs. If I do not reach so far, I shall fall into the garden; that will make a noise, people will hasten from the pavilion, will raise me up, will recognize me, and I die nobly, poetically, pitied! That would be glorious!
“If I arrive, as everything leads me to believe I shall, I will creep in under the skylight over the stairs, and descend barefooted to the first story, the window of which also opens in the garden, at fifteen feet from the ground. I jump. Alas, my strength, my activity are gone! It is true that there is an espalier to assist me. Yes, but this espalier with its rotten framework will break, I shall tumble down, not killed nobly and poetically, but whitened with plaster, my clothes torn, ashamed, and looking as if I had come to rob the orchard! Odious thought! M. de Taverney will order the porter to flog me, or La Brie to pull my ears.
“No! I have here twenty pack-threads, which, twisted together, will make a rope, according to Monsieur Rousseau’s definition that many straws make a sheaf. I shall borrow all these pack-threads from Madame Therese for one night, I shall knot them together, and when I have reached the window on the first floor, I shall tie the rope to the little balcony, or even to the lead, and slip down into the garden.”
When Gilbert had inspected the spout, attached and measured the cords, and calculated the height by his eye, he felt himself strong and determined.
He twisted the pieces of twine together and made a tolerably strong rope of them, then tried its strength by hanging to a beam in his garret, and, happy to find that he had only spat blood once during his efforts, he decided upon the nocturnal expedition.
The better to hoodwink Monsieur Jacques and Therese, he counterfeited illness, and kept his bed until two o’clock, at which time Rousseau went out for his after-dinner walk and did not return till the evening. When Rousseau paid a visit to his attic, before setting out, Gilbert announced to him his wish of sleeping until the next morning; to which Rousseau replied, that as he had made an engagement to sup from home that evening, he was happy to find Gilbert inclined to rest.
With these mutual explanations they separated. When Rousseau was gone, Gilbert brought out his pack-threads again, and this time he twisted them permanently.
He again examined the spout and the tiles; then placed himself at the window to keep watch on the garden until evening.