The Lily of the Valley

“Till this evening.

“Félix.”

To what genius fed on tears may we some day owe the most touching elegy⁠—the picture of the tortures suffered in silence by souls whose roots, while still tender, find nothing but hard pebbles in the soil of home, whose earliest blossoms are rent by the hands of hate, whose flowers are frostbitten as soon as they open? What poet will tell of the sorrows of the child whose lips suck the milk of bitterness, whose smiles are checked by the scorching fire of a stern eye? The fiction that should depict these poor crushed hearts, downtrodden by those who are placed about them to encourage the development of their feelings, would be the true story of my childhood.

What vanities could I, a newborn babe, have fretted? What moral or physical deformity earned me my mother’s coldness? Was I the offspring of duty, a child whose birth is fortuitous, or one whose existence is a standing reproach?

Sent to be nursed in the country and forgotten by my parents for three years, when I returned to my father’s house I counted for so little that I had to endure the pity of the servants. I know not to what feeling nor to what happy chance I owed it that I was able to rally after this first disaster; as a child I did not understand, and as a man I do not know. My brother and my two sisters, far from mitigating my fate, amused themselves by tormenting me.

Too shy to ask anyone to dance with me, and fearing, too, that I might make confusion in the figures, I naturally felt very awkward, not knowing what to do with myself. Just when I was most conscious of the fatigue of constantly moving under the pressure of the crowd, an officer trod on my feet, which were swollen by the pressure of my shoes and by the heat. This crowning annoyance disgusted me with the whole affair. It was impossible to get away, and I took refuge in a corner at the extreme end of a vacant bench, where I sat down, my gaze fixed, motionless, and sulky. A woman, misled by my delicate looks, took me for a boy half asleep while awaiting my mother’s pleasure, and seated herself by me with the light movement of a bird settling on its nest. I was at once aware of a feminine fragrance which flashed upon my soul as Oriental poetry has flashed upon it since. I looked at my neighbor, and was more dazzled by her than I had been by the ball.

If you have at all entered into my previous life, you can guess the emotions that swelled my heart. My eyes were suddenly fascinated by white rounded shoulders that made me long to bury my face in them, shoulders faintly pink, as if they were blushing to find themselves bare for the first time, bashful shoulders with a soul of their own and a satin skin shining in the light like a silken fabric. Between these shoulders ran a furrow which my eyes, bolder than my hand, glided into.

On this occasion I had to affect the highest spirits to persuade him to play. He complained of giddiness that hindered his calculations, his brain was crushed in a vice, he had a singing in his ears, he was suffocating, and sighed and groaned. At last he consented to come to the table. Madame de Mortsauf then left us to put the children to bed and to read prayers for the household. All went well during her absence; I contrived that Monsieur de Mortsauf should win, and his success restored his good-humor. The sudden transition from a state of depression, in which he had given utterance to the most gloomy anticipations for himself, to this joviality like that of a drunken man, and to crazy, irrational mirth, distressed and terrified me. I had never seen him so frankly and unmistakably beside himself. Our intimacy had borne fruit; he was no longer on his guard with me. Day by day he tried to involve me in his tyranny, and find in me fresh food for his humors⁠—for it really would seem that mental disorders are living things with appetites and instincts, and a craving to extend the limits of their dominion as a landowner seeks to enlarge his borders.

The Countess came down again, and drew near the backgammon table for a better light on her work, but she sat down to her frame with ill-disguised apprehension.

I told her the story of my childhood and youth, not as I have related it to you, calmly judged from a distance, but in the words of a young man whose wounds are still bleeding. My voice rang like the axe of a woodman in a forest. The dead years fell crashing down before it, and the long misery that had crowned them with leafless boughs. In fevered words I described to her a thousand odious details that I have spared you. I displayed the treasury of my splendid hopes, the virgin gold of my desires, a burning heart kept hot under the Alps of ice piled up through a perpetual winter. And then, when, crushed by the burden of my griefs uttered with the fire of an Isaiah, I waited for a word from the woman who had heard me with a downcast head, she lightened the darkness with a look, and vivified the worlds, earthly and divine, by one single sentence.

“Our childhood was the same,” said she, showing me a face bright with the halo of martyrdom.

After a pause, during which our souls were wedded by the same consoling thought, “Then I was not the only one to suffer!” the Countess told me, in the tones she kept for her children, how luckless she had been as a girl when the boys were dead.

I flew up the steps and went into the drawing-room, where neither the Count nor his wife saw or noticed me. Hearing the madman’s noisy outcries, I first shut all the doors, and then came back, for I had seen that Henriette was as white as her gown.

“Never marry, Félix,” said the Count. “A wife has the Devil for her counselor; the best of them would invent evil if it did not exist. They are all brute beasts.”

Then I had to listen to arguments without beginning and without end. Monsieur de Mortsauf, recurring to his original refusal, now repeated the sottish remarks of the peasants who objected to the new system. He declared that if he had taken the management of Clochegourde, they would have been twice as rich by now. He worded his blasphemies with insulting violence; he swore, he rushed from pillar to post, he moved and banged all the furniture, and in the middle of a sentence he would stop and declare that his marrow was on fire, or his brain running away in a stream, like his money. His wife was ruining him! Wretched man, of the thirty odd thousand francs a year he possessed, she had brought him more than twenty thousand. The fortune of the Duke and Duchess, bringing in fifty thousand francs a year, was entailed on Jacques.